Amazon.com 2015 Annual Report Download - page 4

Amazon, and they’ve created over 600,000 new jobs. With FBA, that flywheel spins faster because sellers’
inventory becomes Prime-eligible – Prime becomes more valuable for members, and sellers sell more.
This year, we created a new program called Seller Fulfilled Prime. We invited sellers who are able to meet a
high bar for shipping speed and consistency in service to be part of the Prime program and ship their own orders
at Prime speed directly. Those sellers have already seen a significant bump in sales, and the program has led to
hundreds of thousands of additional items that are available to Prime customers via free two-day or next-day
shipping in the U.S., U.K. and Germany.
We also created the Amazon Lending program to help sellers grow. Since the program launched, we’ve
provided aggregate funding of over $1.5 billion to micro, small and medium businesses across the U.S., U.K. and
Japan through short-term loans, with a total outstanding loan balance of about $400 million. Stephen Aarstol,
surfer and owner of Tower Paddle Boards, is one beneficiary. His business has become one of the fastest-
growing companies in San Diego, in part with a little help from Amazon Lending. Click-to-cash access to capital
helps these small enterprises grow, benefits customers with greater selection, and benefits Amazon since our
marketplace revenue grows along with the sellers’ sales. We hope to expand Amazon Lending and are now
working on ways to partner with banks so they can use their expertise to take and manage the bulk of the credit
risk.
In addition to nourishing our big offerings, we work to globalize them. Our Marketplace creates
opportunities for sellers anywhere to reach buyers around the world. In the past, many sellers would limit their
customer base to their home country due to the practical challenges of selling internationally. To globalize
Marketplace and expand the opportunities available to sellers, we built selling tools that empowered
entrepreneurs in 172 countries to reach customers in 189 countries last year. These cross-border sales are now
nearly a quarter of all third-party units sold on Amazon. To make this possible, we translated hundreds of
millions of product listings and provided conversion services among 44 currencies. Even small and niche sellers
can now tap into our global customer base and global logistics network. The end result is very different from
sellers handling their own one-at-a-time, cross-border fulfillment. Plugable Technologies’ CEO, Bernie
Thompson, put it this way: “It really changes the paradigm when you’re able to ship the goods in bulk to a
warehouse in Europe or Japan and have those goods be fulfilled in one day or two days.”
India is another example of how we globalize an offering like Marketplace through customer obsession and
a passion for invention. Last year we ran a program called Amazon Chai Cart where we deployed three-wheeled
mobile carts to navigate in a city’s business districts, serve tea, water and lemon juice to small business owners
and teach them about selling online. In a period of four months, the team traveled 15,280 km across 31 cities,
served 37,200 cups of tea and engaged with over 10,000 sellers. Through this program and other conversations
with sellers, we found out there was a lot of interest in selling online, but that sellers struggled with the belief that
the process was time-consuming, tedious and complex. So, we invented Amazon Tatkal, which enables small
businesses to get online in less than 60 minutes. Amazon Tatkal is a specially designed studio-on-wheels offering
a suite of launch services including registration, imaging and cataloguing services, as well as basic seller training
mechanisms. Since its launch on February 17th, we have reached sellers in 25 cities.
We’re also globalizing Fulfillment by Amazon, adapting the service to local customer needs. In India, we
launched a program called Seller Flex to combine Amazon’s logistics capabilities with sellers’ selection at the local
neighborhood level. Sellers set aside a part of their warehouse for storing items to be sold on Amazon, and we
configure it as a fulfillment center in our network that can receive and fulfill customer orders. Our team provides
guidance on warehouse layout, IT and operational infrastructure, and trains the seller on standard operating
procedures to be followed onsite. We’ve now launched 25 operational Seller Flex sites across ten cities.
Amazon Web Services
Just over 10 years ago, AWS started in the U.S. with its first major service, a simple storage service. Today,
AWS offers more than 70 services for compute, storage, databases, analytics, mobile, Internet of Things, and
enterprise applications. We also offer 33 Availability Zones across 12 geographic regions worldwide, with