On, many of these products rank as top sellers in their categories and show up first in search results.

It’s added hundreds of new products to its AmazonBasics brand, which now furnishes a wide range of household items, from computer cables to swivel chairs. Earlier this year, the company unveiled 7 of its own fashion lines, offering more than 1,800 items of apparel. Īs Amazon grows its logistics empire, it’s also manufacturing more of the goods that are moving through it. Amazon reportedly wanted Hachette to fork over more fees, and for several months it suppressed the career prospects and incomes of some 3,000 authors to get its way. We know Amazon has this power to destroy a book’s prospects because it demonstrated it two years ago when it suspended pre- orders and delayed shipping times by weeks for thousands of books put out by the publisher Hachette, and modified its search and recommendation algorithms to direct shoppers to other books. This is such a significant share of the market that Amazon can, at any moment, remove the buy-button from a particular title on its site and cause overall sales of that book to plummet by 50 percent or more -a dominance so astounding that it warrants pausing a moment to consider what it means. Two-thirds of books, both print and digital, are now sold online and Amazon captures nearly 70 percent of those sales. Today, many people still think of the company mainly as a bookseller, and Amazon does indeed loom large in the book business. For several years after Jeff Bezos made live in 1995, the company sold only books.

The vanishing middle class amazon