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Amazon's own retail operations ("sold and shipped by Amazon.com") are simply a mechanism to keep people paying for recurring Amazon Prime subscriptions. Retail profit margins are 2% to 4%, and Amazon has expanded beyond it to businesses with much higher profit margins such as AWS, media (music/tv/movies), logistics, and as a platform for other sellers.

Amazon's market cap is $1.7T, and Walmart's is $391B. And Walmart's retail business is much larger than Amazon's. Compared to Amazon's non retail businesses, Amazon's retail business is worth only as much as it keeps people subscribed to Amazon prime.




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