Amazon has announced that it has helped more than 50,000 small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) generate more than $500,000 in sales in 2018, while 200,000 SMBs managed to generate $100,000, which is still a significant number. A smaller group of businesses earning over $1 million in sales grew by 20% last year.
Discussing the results, Nick Denissen, Vice President for Amazon, said:
“This year growth of small and medium-sized businesses in our stores enabled business owners to create new products, provide greater selection to customers, and reinvest in their local communities through job creation. Since we opened our shelves to third-party sellers in 2001, small and medium-sized businesses have been an integral part of Amazon’s DNA. Our guiding star is an obsession with customers, and the service we’ve built is more powerful because we have small and medium-sized businesses complementing and competing with our retail business.”
The retail giant said that more than a million businesses that use its platform operate from the United States and that as a whole businesses on its platform operate from 130 different countries around the world. The firm also reported that SMBs in the U.S. using Fulfillment by Amazon more than doubled their export sales; this contributed to SMBs exceeding $1.5 billion in sales during Prime Day in 2018.
The figures from Amazon are quite interesting; while online shopping is being held responsible for destroying the high street we can see from these figures that businesses are still managing to do quite well in this new environment.