Unfortunately, this is merely Bezos cashing in on the US government's ignorance on sales tax and the internet and winning [1]. If you see Bezos' history you can

Unfortunately, this is merely Bezos cashing in on the US government's ignorance on sales tax and the internet and winning [1]. If you see Bezos' history you can see that he is a financial engineer and he engineered it well [2]. That's not to say it isn't ridiculously impressive regardless of that and there were many other points that could have been missed, and weren't. But the amount of money that was, essentially accidentally, injected into Amazon this way, accelerating it's revenue by double-digit percentages in a way inaccessible to it's competitors is staggering. The problem with mail order has always been that they can never match Walmart's prices on logistics, because of the economies of scale. Because Walmart's customers bridge the expensive last mile for Amazon. Amazon has worked very hard to make the cost difference for the last mile less, but even now it's not a match. So how could Amazon ever become competitive ? Tax optimization. And then Bezos' figured he could make sales tax pay for last mile : that despite having local state infrastructure he would not have either pay sales tax himself or force his customers to, which was a big gamble, and frankly questionable in legality, a clear advantage over his shop-based competition. But he won, despite a few incidents. This was the main, but not the only successful "tax optimization" Amazon successfully executed. This is the same hole Alibaba exploited and quite a few others. Cheap toys from China work because they 1) don't pay fair price for delivery due to international postal agreements [3] 2) don't pay taxes like their US based competitors do. They don't pay sales tax, nor do they pay quite a few other taxes. (I'm going to assume this is well known) Now there are plenty of other companies that were extremely well positioned to do the same, above all perhaps Ebay, but they ... well they screwed up royally. Perhaps this did not need to lead directly to Amazon and Alibaba/"China inc" perse, but something like them are the result of government "planning" (between quotes because this is how a whole host of negotiations by lots of people interested in other things turned out, not the result of anyone's plan, it is a series of accidents (and mostly costly mistakes) cemented in international and interstate agreements). So the great accomplishment of Amazon and Bezos is to (a) be new, and able to construct their companies around the holes in these agreements (b) to know about the holes in the agreements in the first place. The greatest threat to Amazon is China. But sadly, and despite that I agree that Amazon's technical and organizational structure are a remarkable feat, the company is the result of Bezos exploiting accidental governmental financial engineering to a large extent. [1] http://money.cnn.com/2017/03/29/technology/amazon-sales-tax/index.html http://money.cnn.com/2017/03/29/technology/amazon-sales-tax/... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos#Early_career https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos#Early_career [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/storyline/wp/2014/09/12/the-postal-service-is-losing-millions-a-year-to-help-you-buy-cheap-stuff-from-china/?utm_term=.44bcf4113384 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/storyline/wp/2014/09/12/...