
A list of Amazon’s businesses and subsidiaries - snooty
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/leticiamiranda/these-are-all-the-businesses-you-never-knew-were-owned-by
======
danpalmer
It's a natural trend within retail marketplaces to move from selling other
people's products to selling your own. You need the wide range to begin with
to be useful enough that people use you, but retail can be low margin, and
margin is a very important metric to optimise retail businesses, so it makes
sense to introduce your own products that "cut out the middleman" so you can
have a bigger share of the margin on those products.

India has introduced an interesting law that prohibits this practice – a
retailer can either be a marketplace with no products of their own, or they
can sell their products and not others. They can't be both, as it's seen as
creating bad incentives for companies.

I think India may be taking it too far, and I think there are many business
that provide value to consumers, but which depend on being able to blend
together products at different margins. However I suspect we will see legal
battles and/or legislation in Europe soon, as we have with cases like Google
allegedly ranking Google services above competing services in Google results
(a case with many parallels).

Disclaimer, I work for a "marketplace" that sells its own products alongside
those from partners.

~~~
notafraudster
How did India unwind existing retailers? And, as a side question, what
prevents retailers from doing a stupid shell company game where the product
line and the retail arm are minimally legally separated but still totally the
same company?

I ask these not to do a "gotcha", but because this is the first I'm hearing of
this and it's fascinating and I'd like to know more.

~~~
notmyaccount
Amazon and Flipkart used its business power in India to buy up thousands of
products in bulk, sell them to vendors on their platforms, and then allow
those vendors to offer the same products to customers. They also used to offer
to cover vendor losses for discounts on its site using their dollar might at a
loss to themselves. It was a huge incentive for heavily cost-conscious Indian
consumers as an incentive to move from offline marketplace to online
marketplace. This was very important in a pre-dominantly cash oriented
conservative Indian market where consumers were reluctant to purchase things
online due to fear of fraud. In addition to this, they started offering 0%
cost financing for 6 months to purchase the products at installments without
any interest rate with or without credit cards. However, what it is doing is
driving offline markets out of the business as they cannot match the discounts
offered by these companies. This is the reason trade association complained to
the government and government decided to take this action.

For example, a smartphone that sells at $400 at offline stores would be
available for $350 on Amazon/Flipkart. The cost price of device would be $350
for offline stores. You can also use No Cost financing to purchase the product
for monthly payment of $58.33 for 6 months (Totaling $350). Amazon/Flipkart
would absorb the interest cost. The losses are obvious as neither Amazon India
Inc. (opened 2013) nor Flipkart (opened 2007 and the biggest Indian
marketplace bought by Walmart in 2018 for $16 Billion) have made a cent of
profit in India. Both Flipkart and Amazon had losses around $500 million for
FY17-18, a number expected to go up post Walmart's purchase of Flipkart. Also,
Amazon Prime is India is available for $15 a year and includes Amazon Prime
Video, Amazon Prime Music and 1 Day Free Standard Shipping with no minimum
order. In a country where data is basically free (30GB 4G Data with unlimited
calls/messages per month for $2), this also adds to pushing people towards
Amazon.

On a seperate note, a similar thing is taking place in Indian food delivery
market where food delivery companies like Zomato, Swiggy or Ubereats are
offering steep continuous discounts of 40-60% forcing delivery restaurants to
jump into their ecosystem. The Restaurant association has also approached
government with their complaints.

For Example, a Sub that sells for $4 would be delivered for $2 including
delivery cost. The delivery companies absorbing rest of the costs.

~~~
LudwigNagasena
Does India not have any anti-dumping / pro-competition laws?

~~~
notmyaccount
The All India Online Vendors Association (AIOVA), which represents more than
3,500 online sellers did file a complaint against Flipkart/Amazon with
Competition Commission of India (CCI) however, CCI did not find any violation
of existing laws in Amazon or Flipkarts trade practices. IANAL but India does
have Anti-Dumping and Pro-Competition laws but probably they are not updated
for e-commerce. Amazon and Flipkart are able to find loop holes in it to
continue their practices. Which is why Govt. imposed the marketplace cannot
sell the products laws.

For Food delivery, the Restaurant Association is discussing the matter with
Govt. Agencies. This article would be able to explain laws better :
[http://www.mondaq.com/india/x/808174/Antitrust+Competition/C...](http://www.mondaq.com/india/x/808174/Antitrust+Competition/Competition+Law+In+India+VisaVis+Food+Delivery+Apps+In+India+Zomato+Swiggy+Foodpanda+Uber+Eats+And+Its+Impact+On+Small+Restaurants)

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massysett
Not very useful. Many of the listings have “Amazon” in the name so it’s
obvious who owns them. Most of the rest are branded items, which isn’t the
same as a “business” because I think most people know that retailers sell
branded items, and besides, Amazon prominently identifies many of these, such
as “Pinzon by Amazon”. So really all that is left is maybe half a dozen items,
like Zappos and Whole Foods.

~~~
jammygit
Had no idea that goodreads and IMDb were amazon

~~~
manojlds
IMDB prominently used in Prime Videos and the site explicitly says An Amazon
Company.

Compare that to Zappos - more difficult to find.

~~~
jdsully
When Zappos was acquired they made a big deal about keeping their unique
culture.

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kyle-rb
The clothing one "Goodthreads" sounds like sort of a play on their existing
GoodReads brand. I'm disappointed there weren't more like this: Slumberyard
for pajamas, Fruit 53 for produce, Breadshift for baked goods, etc.

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cardamomo
I have the most bizarre sensation when reading through this. On one level,
they're just boring brand names. But knowing that they were all created by
Amazon for Purposes and their names chosen presumedly by marketing folks...
Well, it sorta makes this read like the most genius piece of satire about
today's retail marketplace. It would fit somewhere between McSweeny's lists[0]
and AI-written paint color names[1]

[0]
[https://www.mcsweeneys.net/columns/lists](https://www.mcsweeneys.net/columns/lists)

[1] [https://aiweirdness.com/post/160776374467/new-paint-
colors-i...](https://aiweirdness.com/post/160776374467/new-paint-colors-
invented-by-neural-network)

~~~
oska
They weren't all created by Amazon. Quite a number of them are acquisitions,
e.g. AbeBooks, Book Depository, Goodreads and IMDb.

~~~
cardamomo
Right, I'm familiar with those. I'm thinking of the many clothing brands in
particular. They all sound _almost_ plausible.

I found this search helpful in verifying which brand names were created
directly by Amazon and which (like Goodreads) were acquired companies:
[https://trademarks.justia.com/owners/amazon-technologies-
inc...](https://trademarks.justia.com/owners/amazon-technologies-inc-2452347/)

------
yumraj
It's interesting to contrast between Amazon and Costco strategy as far as the
store brands go.

Costco has 1 store brand, Kirkland, that they are open about and in fact push
it as a equal/better brand.

Amazon on the other hand has the Amazon Basics as an economy brand but also
have these numerous hidden brands.

~~~
Sherl
I think Costco is built on baby boomers and it become a cult to spend time in
warehouse, walking through huge aisles, discovering those treasures and
samples. Amazon on other hand needs economies of scale by constantly sending
you notifications or keeping track of your habits.

Costco also uses the same strategy to comeup with products. I used to see GT
Kombucha and now costco has their own line of Kombucha as well. This is
similar to Amazon where you observe the products at someones cost and make it
inhouse if its viable. Another fact with Costco the costs being low is the
businesses that sell at costco can only have as much as 20% of their total
revenue from Costco -- which is like paying only for the variable cost as the
rest 80% of revenue would absorb that fixed costs in supply chain. This is a
huge bonus.

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gigama
Years ago got an account with Abebooks because I didn't like Amazon keeping
such a detailed list of every book I ever thought to read or bought as a gift
for someone else. Then I found out Abebooks is still Amazon. (Didn't have this
list to refer to back then.) Closed that account and now buy my books through
Alibris and the used bookstore by the university. Feels good to support
independent booksellers and resist the Amazon-Borg collective.

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blackflame7000
So how is this different than standard oil again? Not that I'm advocating
breaking up the tech companies but it's no coincidence that the growth of the
modern conglomerate has also strongly correlated with income disparity.
Instead of 5 CEOs and 25 VPs, you now have 1 CEO, 5 VPs, and 25 Junior VPs all
being paid less because they no longer get the same share of the equity.

~~~
damagednoob
From what I understand, Standard Oil used their dominance in the market to
stifle competition and 'restrain trade'. Because Amazon is big doesn't
necessarily mean they are doing these things. I would imagine they are being
very careful not to fall foul of these laws, unlike Microsoft in 2001.

~~~
blackflame7000
There’s certainly a argument to be made on stifling competition if even
Walmart has trouble keeping up. What hope do small to moderate regional retail
stores have? All that regional wealth is sucked up online and redistributed to
a few managers of mangers instead of actually making the communities better by
allowing people to own a part of it.

The biggest problem that’s causing income disparity is that people are
consuming things rather than owning things.

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vermilingua
> Alexa Internet: Acquired by Amazon in 1999, this Amazon subsidiary, based in
> California, provides companies with commercial web traffic data and
> analytics.

Interesting (and entirely unsurprising, really) that the “personal assistant”
was (probably) named after a data gathering/analytics company.

------
novaleaf
TenMarks (kids education) was actually quite good. It has been shuttered
recently.

For some reason it was institutional focus only, and getting a family license
was quite expensive.

too bad all that high quality edu content is gone now :(

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andrewstuart
When does the organisation lose so much focus that it all becomes very
ordinary.

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darawk
All of the big things on here I already knew were owned by Amazon (Zappos,
IMDB, etc.)...all of the small things were trivial clothing imprints or
similar. This is a pretty substanceless piece.

~~~
bostonpete
Some of them say they were shut down years ago too so I guess this list also
includes all their acquisitions (?)

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paxys
Honestly, there isn't any company on this list that I had heard of before that
I didn't already know was owned by Amazon. And most of the list is just
brands, not entire companies or businesses.

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whymauri
Amazon sold Curse to Wikia Inc.

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cek
Missing a large number of AWS brands. S3, EC2, Sumarian, ...

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pardavis
They missed the most interesting ones ;)

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ryanlol
These are also primarily businesses you never knew about, so what?

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jim-jim-jim
It's also worth mentioning that Bezos owns the Washington Post, which may help
explain the paper's well-documented hostility to Bernie Sanders:

[https://fair.org/home/washington-post-ran-16-negative-
storie...](https://fair.org/home/washington-post-ran-16-negative-stories-on-
bernie-sanders-in-16-hours/)

