Amazon.com 2007 Annual Report Download - page 13

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We offer everyday free shipping options worldwide. We also offer Amazon Prime, a membership program
in which members receive free or discounted express shipping, in the United States, the United Kingdom,
Germany and Japan. Although marketing expenses do not include the costs of our free shipping or promotional
offers, we view such offers as effective marketing tools.
Seller Customers
Through Amazon Services, we offer programs that enable seller customers to sell their products on our
websites and fulfill orders through us, allow consumer customers to shop for products owned by sellers using our
features and technologies, and allow individual customers to complete transactions that include multiple sellers
in a single checkout process. We are not the seller of record in these transactions, but instead earn fixed fees,
sales commissions, per-unit activity fees, or some combination thereof.
Our seller programs serve individuals, small businesses, and large branded businesses, enabling them to
offer their new and used products for sale on our websites alongside our products and products made available by
other sellers. We also offer fulfillment-related services to sellers through Fulfillment by Amazon.
In addition, Amazon Enterprise Solutions offers sellers e-commerce expertise, proven technology, and
operational infrastructure to enable e-commerce businesses operating under their own brand name and website
address (e.g. www.target.com).
Developer Customers
We serve developer customers through Amazon Web Services, which provides access to technology
infrastructure that developers can use to enable virtually any type of business.
These services include:
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), which provides a simple web services interface for
storing and retrieving data from anywhere on the web;
• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides a scalable up and down virtual
computing environment, allowing developers to use web service interfaces to requisition machines for
use and load them with their custom application environment, making web-scale computing easier for
developers;
• Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), which offers a reliable, highly scalable hosted queue for
storing messages as they travel between computers;
• Amazon SimpleDB, which provides a web service to create and store multiple data sets, query data
easily, and return the results;
• Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS), which provides a payments service designed
specifically for developers, providing greater flexibility in the movement of money;
• Amazon Mechanical Turk, which provides a web service for computers to integrate a network of
humans directly into their processes; and
• Alexa’s Web Services, which offer a platform for creating innovative web solutions and services based
on Alexa’s vast repository of information about the web.
Competition
Our market segments are rapidly evolving and intensely competitive. Our current and potential competitors
include: (1) physical-world retailers, publishers, vendors, distributors, manufacturers and producers of our
products; (2) other online e-commerce and mobile e-commerce sites, including sites that sell or distribute digital
content; (3) a number of indirect competitors, including media companies, Web portals, comparison shopping
websites, and Web search engines, either directly or in collaboration with other retailers; (4) companies that
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