SUMMARY
You should read the following summary together with the entire prospectus supplement and accompanying prospectus and the documents incorporated by reference, including our consolidated financial statements and related notes. You should carefully consider, among other things, the matters discussed in “Risk Factors” in this prospectus supplement, in our Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the three months ended March 31, 2021, which is incorporated by reference herein, and in the other documents incorporated by reference and in the other documents that we subsequently file with the SEC.
About Amazon.com
We seek to be Earth’s most customer-centric company. We are guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. In each of our segments, we serve our primary customer sets, consisting of consumers, sellers, developers, enterprises, and content creators. In addition, we provide services, such as advertising to sellers, vendors, publishers, authors, and others, through programs such as sponsored ads, display, and video advertising.
We have organized our operations into three segments: North America, International, and Amazon Web Services (“AWS”). These segments reflect the way the Company evaluates its business performance and manages its operations.
Consumers
We serve consumers through our online and physical stores and focus on selection, price, and convenience. We design our stores to enable hundreds of millions of unique products to be sold by us and by third parties across dozens of product categories. Customers access our offerings through our websites, mobile apps, Alexa, devices, streaming, and physically visiting our stores. We also manufacture and sell electronic devices, including Kindle, Fire tablet, Fire TV, Echo, Ring, and other devices, and we develop and produce media content. We seek to offer our customers low prices, fast and free delivery, easy-to-use functionality, and timely customer service. In addition, we offer Amazon Prime, a membership program that includes unlimited free shipping on over 100 million items, access to unlimited streaming of tens of thousands of movies and TV episodes, including Amazon Original content, and other benefits.
We fulfill customer orders in a number of ways, including through: North America and International fulfillment networks that we operate; co-sourced and outsourced arrangements in certain countries; digital delivery; and through our physical stores. We operate customer service centers globally, which are supplemented by co-sourced arrangements.
Sellers
We offer programs that enable sellers to grow their businesses, sell their products in our stores, and fulfill orders through us. We are not the seller of record in these transactions. We earn fixed fees, a percentage of sales, per-unit activity fees, interest, or some combination thereof, for our seller programs.
Developers and Enterprises
We serve developers and enterprises of all sizes, including start-ups, government agencies, and academic institutions, through AWS, which offers a broad set of on-demand technology services, including compute, storage, database, analytics, and machine learning, and other services.