>I'm wondering more and more why Amazon hosts third-party sellers at all. Generally the reason any for-profit entity takes a certain action (or inaction) is...

>I'm wondering more and more why Amazon hosts third-party sellers at all. Generally the reason any for-profit entity takes a certain action (or inaction) is... yep, for profit. Sure Amazon can have tremendous scale just retailing for itself. But becoming a marketplace greatly increased its ability to compete with the likes of eBay and Rakuten. I also go out of my way to select the sold by Amazon option if there is one, but often times FBA or completely third-party is the only option. Marketplace increases the surface area of Amazon's product offerings and more importantly makes it a true platform. That's the kind of thinking that can scale up to multibillion-dollar business.