The Amazon ecommerce ecosystem is one of the best examples of how dramatically the internet changed commerce.
Amazon started with books.
Today, when people think about buying something online, Amazon is often one of the first names that comes to mind.
But what interests me most is not simply the size of the company.
It is the system that developed around online shopping.
Customers.
Independent sellers.
Warehouses.
Reviews.
Payments.
Recommendations.
Advertising.
Subscriptions.
Fast delivery.
Returns.
Fulfillment.
Data.
All connected.
That is why I think Amazon is much more interesting when we stop looking at it as just another online store.
It became infrastructure.
And if we want to understand modern ecommerce, the Amazon ecommerce ecosystem is difficult to ignore.
Amazon Was Built for Something the Physical World Could Not Easily Do
Amazon opened its virtual doors as an online bookseller in 1995.
At launch, the company promoted a catalog of more than one million titles — a selection that would have been extremely difficult to reproduce economically inside a traditional physical bookstore. Amazon was already shipping orders to customers across all 50 U.S. states and more than 45 countries within its first weeks.
That tells us something important about the early internet.
The advantage was not simply:
“You can buy books from your computer.”
The bigger advantage was:
the internet removes some of the physical limits of a store.
A physical shop has shelf space.
A location.
Opening hours.
Geographical limits.
An online catalog can work differently.
Amazon demonstrated very early that the internet could create a type of commercial environment that simply did not work the same way offline.
And that was only the beginning.
Then Amazon Stopped Being Only the Seller
This may be the most important shift in the whole story.
Amazon could have remained a very large retailer.
Buy products.
Store them.
Sell them to customers.
Repeat.
Instead, it gradually opened its infrastructure to other businesses.
Independent sellers began selling alongside Amazon.
That changed the model.
Now Amazon did not need to personally own every product being offered.
Other companies could bring their inventory, brands and products into an environment where customers were already shopping.
Today, Amazon says that more than 60% of sales in its store come from independent sellers, most of them small and medium-sized businesses.
Think about what that means.
Amazon is not simply a retailer selling products.
It is also a marketplace connecting:
businesses that want customers
with
customers already looking to buy.
That is a completely different level of ecommerce.
Why the Marketplace Model Is So Powerful
Imagine you have created a product.
You can build your own website.
I actually like that approach because your own website gives you more control over your brand, content and relationship with customers.
But there is a difficult question:
Who is going to visit it?
Your store may look fantastic.
Your product may be excellent.
But you still need traffic.
Amazon approaches the problem from the opposite direction.
The marketplace already has customers.
People arrive with purchase intent.
They are searching.
Comparing.
Reading reviews.
Checking prices.
Looking for delivery information.
The seller enters an environment where commerce is already happening.
That can be extremely powerful.
But there is a trade-off.
On your own website, you control more of the environment.
On Amazon, you are operating inside Amazon’s environment.
Its rules.
Its algorithms.
Its fees.
Its customer expectations.
Its interface.
Its marketplace.
That is why Amazon and Shopify represent two very different ecommerce ideas.
Shopify helps you build your own store.
Amazon gives you access to an existing marketplace.
Neither approach automatically wins.
They solve different problems.
The Customer May Remember Amazon Before They Remember You
This is one of the disadvantages of selling through a large marketplace.
Imagine someone purchases your product through your independent Shopify store.
They visit:
yourbrand.com
They see your colors.
Your story.
Your content.
Your email signup.
Your products.
Your brand is the experience.
Now imagine the same purchase on Amazon.
The customer may say:
“I bought it on Amazon.”
Not:
“I bought it from this particular small company.”
Amazon provides enormous infrastructure and potential reach.
But the platform itself remains very visible in the customer relationship.
That distinction matters if your long-term objective is to build a brand rather than simply generate transactions.
And it is another reason many businesses eventually use multiple ecommerce channels instead of choosing only one.
FBA Changed What a Small Seller Could Outsource
Now we get to another important layer of the Amazon ecommerce ecosystem.
FBA — Fulfillment by Amazon.
The basic idea is simple.
A seller sends inventory into Amazon’s fulfillment network.
When an eligible order comes in, Amazon can handle storage, picking, packing, shipping, customer service and returns.
That matters because selling a physical product online involves much more than putting an image on a website.
Somebody has to store the product.
Find it when an order comes in.
Pack it.
Print labels.
Ship it.
Track it.
Handle problems.
Process returns.
Answer customers.
A small producer may be very good at creating a product and terrible at logistics.
Or perhaps logistics simply takes too much time.
FBA allows that seller to outsource a significant part of the physical infrastructure.
Again, this is why calling Amazon merely a “website where people buy things” misses the bigger picture.
There is an enormous system behind that Buy Now button.
Amazon Helped Change What Customers Expect
This may be Amazon’s biggest influence beyond Amazon itself.
Once customers become accustomed to:
fast delivery,
simple checkout,
order tracking,
clear product information,
reviews,
easy returns,
and personalized recommendations,
those expectations do not disappear when they leave Amazon.
They carry them to other online stores.
That creates pressure on the entire ecommerce industry.
A customer visits a small independent store and wonders:
Why is checkout complicated?
Why can’t I see when the product will arrive?
Where are the reviews?
Why is returning the product so difficult?
Why does the website look unreliable?
This is fascinating because a giant platform can indirectly change the standards expected from thousands of smaller stores.
Amazon did not merely compete inside ecommerce.
It helped shape what consumers think ecommerce should feel like.
Reviews Became Part of the Product Page
Think about how we shop online today.
Many people do not simply read what the company says about a product.
They scroll down.
They want to know:
What did other buyers think?
Does it work?
Is the sizing accurate?
Did it arrive damaged?
Is the quality good?
Would somebody buy it again?
Customer reviews add a social layer to commerce.
That is extremely important online because the buyer cannot always touch the product.
They cannot test it.
They cannot ask the shop assistant standing next to them.
The review system helps reduce uncertainty.
Of course, reviews are not perfect.
They can be misleading, manipulated or irrelevant.
But the underlying idea became fundamental:
buyers want signals from other buyers.
Commerce becomes connected with community information.
That is another characteristic of a digital ecosystem.
Recommendations Turn Shopping Into Discovery
There is also something else Amazon helped normalize:
recommendation systems.
You search for one thing.
Amazon shows related products.
People who bought this also bought that.
Similar options appear.
Sponsored products appear.
Your previous activity affects what you see.
Now ecommerce is not only responding to what you explicitly search for.
The system is actively helping you discover more products.
For sellers, that creates opportunity.
For customers, it creates convenience.
For Amazon, it creates a more valuable commercial environment.
And once again, we see multiple pieces connecting.
Products.
Search.
Customer behavior.
Advertising.
Recommendations.
Transactions.
Data.
The store is becoming a system.
Prime Is More Than Faster Delivery
Amazon Prime is another interesting layer.
People often associate Prime primarily with delivery.
But strategically, it does something deeper.
It creates a reason to remain inside the ecosystem.
Once someone pays for a membership and receives benefits from it, Amazon is no longer simply a website they occasionally visit.
It becomes an environment they have already chosen to participate in.
That can influence purchasing behavior.
The question may stop being:
“Where should I order this?”
and become:
“Is this available on Amazon?”
That is a powerful change.
The platform starts becoming the default starting point rather than one option among many.
This is one of the characteristics I find fascinating about digital ecosystems generally:
the more useful connected services become, the more reasons users have to remain inside the system.
The Seller Side Has Become an Ecosystem Too
The customer sees products.
A seller sees something completely different.
Seller accounts.
Inventory.
Advertising.
Analytics.
Fulfillment.
Shipping.
Reviews.
Brand tools.
Pricing.
Returns.
Marketplace rules.
Payments.
Amazon’s financial filings themselves show how many business layers now sit around commerce: online stores, third-party seller services, advertising, subscriptions and AWS are reported as distinct revenue groups. In the first half of 2026 alone, Amazon reported $88.4 billion in net sales from third-party seller services.
That figure is not the value of all goods those sellers sold; it represents Amazon’s revenue from services such as commissions, fulfillment and shipping related to third-party sellers.
That distinction is important.
Amazon built a business not only around selling products, but around providing infrastructure to people who sell products.
That is a much broader model.
More Than 60% of Amazon Store Sales Now Come From Independent Sellers
This is a statistic worth stopping on.
According to Amazon, more than 60% of sales in its store now come from independent sellers.
In 2025, Amazon also reported that more than 75,000 independent sellers surpassed $1 million in annual sales through its store.
These are Amazon’s own figures, so they should be understood as company-reported data.
But they illustrate how far the marketplace model has evolved.
Amazon is no longer simply:
Amazon → Customer
A huge part of the system is:
Independent business → Amazon infrastructure → Customer
That creates economic activity around the platform rather than only inside Amazon’s own retail inventory.
But Selling on Amazon Is Not Automatic Success
All of this can make Amazon sound incredibly attractive to a seller.
And it can be.
But access to a marketplace does not mean automatic sales.
You still have:
competition,
fees,
product selection,
pricing,
inventory risk,
reviews,
advertising costs,
returns,
marketplace rules,
and other sellers fighting for the same customer’s attention.
A marketplace removes certain barriers.
It creates others.
You may not need to build all of your own traffic infrastructure from zero.
But you also do not fully control the system in which you operate.
That trade-off should always be understood.
Amazon vs Your Own Online Store
I think this is one of the most useful distinctions for beginners.
With Amazon:
you enter an existing market.
With your own ecommerce store:
you build your own digital property.
Amazon may provide discovery.
Your own store may provide greater brand control.
Amazon provides infrastructure.
Your own store can provide a more direct customer relationship.
Amazon provides trust that already exists.
Your own store has to earn that trust.
But your own store can also become an asset around which you build:
content,
email,
community,
your brand,
and other products.
That is why I do not think ecommerce needs to be an either/or conversation.
A business can potentially use marketplaces and its own store.
Different channels can play different roles.
What the Amazon Ecommerce Ecosystem Teaches Us
This is where the Amazon story becomes much bigger than Amazon.
It teaches us that ecommerce is not simply:
Product → Website → Buy button.
A functioning ecommerce system involves many layers.
Discovery.
Trust.
Payment.
Logistics.
Customer support.
Reviews.
Retention.
Data.
Communication.
And increasingly, community and recommendations.
The better those pieces work together, the easier the customer journey becomes.
That lesson applies whether you are Amazon or a small producer selling ten products.
You do not need Amazon’s scale.
But you do need to think about the system around the sale.
From Online Store to Digital Ecosystem
That is why the Amazon ecommerce ecosystem fascinates me.
Amazon started by solving a relatively simple problem:
How can people buy books through the internet?
But once that worked, more layers became possible.
More products.
More sellers.
More customers.
Fulfillment.
Subscriptions.
Advertising.
Reviews.
Recommendations.
Digital services.
The system expanded.
One useful component connected to another.
That is how an online store can gradually become something much bigger.
And it is exactly why I keep writing about digital ecosystems.
The future of ecommerce is not only about creating another webshop.
It is about understanding how commerce connects with everything around it.
Traffic.
Social interaction.
Content.
Trust.
Community.
Payments.
Logistics.
Technology.
Customer relationships.
Amazon is an extreme example.
But the underlying principle applies at every scale.
Amazon Is a Marketplace. But It Is Also a Lesson.
You do not have to sell on Amazon.
You do not have to copy Amazon.
And a small online business should certainly not try to operate like a trillion-dollar technology company.
But Amazon’s development gives us a useful way to understand how internet commerce evolved.
It showed that people would buy products they had never physically touched.
It showed that independent businesses could sell through a shared marketplace.
It showed how fulfillment infrastructure could become a service.
It helped raise expectations around delivery and customer experience.
And it demonstrated what can happen when ecommerce stops being one website feature and becomes part of a connected ecosystem.
That, to me, is the most interesting part of the Amazon story.
Amazon became more than a place to buy things.
It became one of the systems through which a significant part of online commerce happens.
And that is a very different idea.
Where Do We Go Next?
On filipdoric.com, I’m exploring ecommerce from several different perspectives.
We have already looked at what ecommerce is and how platforms such as Shopify allow businesses to create their own online stores.
Amazon represents another path:
entering an existing marketplace with customers, infrastructure and rules already in place.
Next, we can look at Etsy — a marketplace with a very different identity, audience and type of seller.
And after that, the really interesting comparison begins:
Shopify vs Amazon vs Etsy.
Three ways to sell online.
Three very different relationships between the seller, platform and customer.
If you’re also interested in what my team and I are working on around the next phase of ecommerce and connected digital ecosystems, join my newsletter and follow the development.
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