👉 Background: Amazon launched its Amazon Web Services back in 2006 as a cloud computing service. Essentially, that means that any app, website or e-commerce site can manage their platform in Amazon’s cloud.

👉 What happened: In the last 3 months, AWS generated over $20 billion USD alone. But AWS can't stop. Now, it has unveiled new software to help both online and physical retailers boost sales.

👉 What else: The tech is based on AWS' online retail lessons from the past 10 years. But many retailers are reluctant to leverage this service, which is also considered their e-commerce competitor.

What's the key learning?

💡It’s hard to be both a partner and competitor, without gaining an unfair advantage. Amazon plays multiple roles in e-commerce.

• It is a online retailer
• It has a marketplace for third-party online retailers
• It collects all the cloud data of physical and online stores

💡A report from the Wall Street Journal claims that Amazon captures data from its marketplace and then uses that info to grow its own private label products. Ring lights selling well? Cool. Let’s sell Amazon-branded ring lights.

💡In fact, Amazon’s private-label business encompasses more than 45 brands and over 243,000 products. So you can see why retailers would be reluctant to share their valuable data with AWS.

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