10 ms·

A list of Amazon’s businesses and subsidiaries

168 points by snooty 7y ago

danpalmer 7y ago
It's a natural trend within retail marketplaces to move from selling other people's products to selling your own. You need the wide range to begin with to be useful enough that people use you, but retail can be low margin, and margin is a very important metric to optimise retail businesses, so it makes sense to introduce your own products that "cut out the middleman" so you can have a bigger share of the margin on those products. India has introduced an interesting law that prohibits this practice – a retailer can either be a marketplace with no products of their own, or they can sell their products and not others. They can't be both, as it's seen as creating bad incentives for companies. I think India may be taking it too far, and I think there are many business that provide value to consumers, but which depend on being able to blend together products at different margins. However I suspect we will see legal battles and/or legislation in Europe soon, as we have with cases like Google allegedly ranking Google services above competing services in Google results (a case with many parallels). Disclaimer, I work for a "marketplace" that sells its own products alongside those from partners.
- notafraudster 7y ago
  How did India unwind existing retailers? And, as a side question, what prevents retailers from doing a stupid shell company game where the product line and the retail arm are minimally legally separated but still totally the same company? I ask these not to do a "gotcha", but because this is the first I'm hearing of this and it's fascinating and I'd like to know more.
  - danpalmer 7y ago
    I'm afraid I don't know all the details. This article has some info: https://thenextweb.com/in/2019/02/01/heres-why-amazon-cant-sell-its-own-products-in-india-right-now/ https://thenextweb.com/in/2019/02/01/heres-why-amazon-cant-s...
  - notmyaccount 7y ago
    Amazon and Flipkart used its business power in India to buy up thousands of products in bulk, sell them to vendors on their platforms, and then allow those vendors to offer the same products to customers. They also used to offer to cover vendor losses for discounts on its site using their dollar might at a loss to themselves. It was a huge incentive for heavily cost-conscious Indian consumers as an incentive to move from offline marketplace to online marketplace. This was very important in a pre-dominantly cash oriented conservative Indian market where consumers were reluctant to purchase things online due to fear of fraud. In addition to this, they started offering 0% cost financing for 6 months to purchase the products at installments without any interest rate with or without credit cards. However, what it is doing is driving offline markets out of the business as they cannot match the discounts offered by these companies. This is the reason trade association complained to the government and government decided to take this action. For example, a smartphone that sells at $400 at offline stores would be available for $350 on Amazon/Flipkart. The cost price of device would be $350 for offline stores. You can also use No Cost financing to purchase the product for monthly payment of $58.33 for 6 months (Totaling $350). Amazon/Flipkart would absorb the interest cost. The losses are obvious as neither Amazon India Inc. (opened 2013) nor Flipkart (opened 2007 and the biggest Indian marketplace bought by Walmart in 2018 for $16 Billion) have made a cent of profit in India. Both Flipkart and Amazon had losses around $500 million for FY17-18, a number expected to go up post Walmart's purchase of Flipkart. Also, Amazon Prime is India is available for $15 a year and includes Amazon Prime Video, Amazon Prime Music and 1 Day Free Standard Shipping with no minimum order. In a country where data is basically free (30GB 4G Data with unlimited calls/messages per month for $2), this also adds to pushing people towards Amazon. On a seperate note, a similar thing is taking place in Indian food delivery market where food delivery companies like Zomato, Swiggy or Ubereats are offering steep continuous discounts of 40-60% forcing delivery restaurants to jump into their ecosystem. The Restaurant association has also approached government with their complaints. For Example, a Sub that sells for $4 would be delivered for $2 including delivery cost. The delivery companies absorbing rest of the costs.
    - LudwigNagasena 7y ago
      Does India not have any anti-dumping / pro-competition laws?
  - inapis 7y ago
    They didn’t. Many companies have already found loopholes. Amazon, Flipkart and Big Bazaar have their own in house labels for sale
- inapis 7y ago
  Even then amazon and flipkart have their own in-house brands on the their websites. And Big Bazaar (akin to Walmart) sells its own in house items under different names. They’ve already found loopholes.
massysett 7y ago
Not very useful. Many of the listings have “Amazon” in the name so it’s obvious who owns them. Most of the rest are branded items, which isn’t the same as a “business” because I think most people know that retailers sell branded items, and besides, Amazon prominently identifies many of these, such as “Pinzon by Amazon”. So really all that is left is maybe half a dozen items, like Zappos and Whole Foods.
- jammygit 7y ago
  Had no idea that goodreads and IMDb were amazon
  - acgh213 7y ago
    IMDb surprised me at first, but goodreads was openly discussed on the site when Amazon took over.
  - manojlds 7y ago
    IMDB prominently used in Prime Videos and the site explicitly says An Amazon Company. Compare that to Zappos - more difficult to find.
    - jdsully 7y ago
      When Zappos was acquired they made a big deal about keeping their unique culture.
- obmelvin 7y ago
  Eh, I think it can be useful to others. Your point about Amazon being explicitly part of some of the names is certainly fair. However, a few months ago I saw something on HN that has had me informally polling friends to see if they know who owns YouTube. I find it so obviously owned by Google, but to my surprise most of my friends I've asked didn't know (20s, some of them in PhD programs). Well aware this is not a statistically valid poll, but my point is that there are at least some well educated people who have no clue about some of these corporate relationships.
cardamomo 7y ago
I have the most bizarre sensation when reading through this. On one level, they're just boring brand names. But knowing that they were all created by Amazon for Purposes and their names chosen presumedly by marketing folks... Well, it sorta makes this read like the most genius piece of satire about today's retail marketplace. It would fit somewhere between McSweeny's lists[0] and AI-written paint color names[1] [0] https://www.mcsweeneys.net/columns/lists https://www.mcsweeneys.net/columns/lists [1] https://aiweirdness.com/post/160776374467/new-paint-colors-invented-by-neural-network https://aiweirdness.com/post/160776374467/new-paint-colors-i...
- oska 7y ago
  They weren't all created by Amazon. Quite a number of them are acquisitions, e.g. AbeBooks, Book Depository, Goodreads and IMDb.
  - cardamomo 7y ago
    Right, I'm familiar with those. I'm thinking of the many clothing brands in particular. They all sound almost plausible. I found this search helpful in verifying which brand names were created directly by Amazon and which (like Goodreads) were acquired companies: https://trademarks.justia.com/owners/amazon-technologies-inc-2452347/ https://trademarks.justia.com/owners/amazon-technologies-inc...
kyle-rb 7y ago
The clothing one "Goodthreads" sounds like sort of a play on their existing GoodReads brand. I'm disappointed there weren't more like this: Slumberyard for pajamas, Fruit 53 for produce, Breadshift for baked goods, etc.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
andrewstuart 7y ago
When does the organisation lose so much focus that it all becomes very ordinary.
jim-jim-jim 7y ago
It's also worth mentioning that Bezos owns the Washington Post, which may help explain the paper's well-documented hostility to Bernie Sanders: https://fair.org/home/washington-post-ran-16-negative-stories-on-bernie-sanders-in-16-hours/ https://fair.org/home/washington-post-ran-16-negative-storie...
yumraj 7y ago
It's interesting to contrast between Amazon and Costco strategy as far as the store brands go. Costco has 1 store brand, Kirkland, that they are open about and in fact push it as a equal/better brand. Amazon on the other hand has the Amazon Basics as an economy brand but also have these numerous hidden brands.
- arien 7y ago
  I'm guessing it's some kind of A/B testing done by Amazon. Do people trust in the Amazon brand, or do they rather buy from unknown brands that offer cheap but decent quality (compared to the cheap and poor quality counterparts that flood the site)? Each brand is probably there to answer a specific question (or set of).
- Sherl 7y ago
  I think Costco is built on baby boomers and it become a cult to spend time in warehouse, walking through huge aisles, discovering those treasures and samples. Amazon on other hand needs economies of scale by constantly sending you notifications or keeping track of your habits. Costco also uses the same strategy to comeup with products. I used to see GT Kombucha and now costco has their own line of Kombucha as well. This is similar to Amazon where you observe the products at someones cost and make it inhouse if its viable. Another fact with Costco the costs being low is the businesses that sell at costco can only have as much as 20% of their total revenue from Costco -- which is like paying only for the variable cost as the rest 80% of revenue would absorb that fixed costs in supply chain. This is a huge bonus.
blackflame7000 7y ago
So how is this different than standard oil again? Not that I'm advocating breaking up the tech companies but it's no coincidence that the growth of the modern conglomerate has also strongly correlated with income disparity. Instead of 5 CEOs and 25 VPs, you now have 1 CEO, 5 VPs, and 25 Junior VPs all being paid less because they no longer get the same share of the equity.
- damagednoob 7y ago
  From what I understand, Standard Oil used their dominance in the market to stifle competition and 'restrain trade'. Because Amazon is big doesn't necessarily mean they are doing these things. I would imagine they are being very careful not to fall foul of these laws, unlike Microsoft in 2001.
  - blackflame7000 7y ago
    There’s certainly a argument to be made on stifling competition if even Walmart has trouble keeping up. What hope do small to moderate regional retail stores have? All that regional wealth is sucked up online and redistributed to a few managers of mangers instead of actually making the communities better by allowing people to own a part of it. The biggest problem that’s causing income disparity is that people are consuming things rather than owning things.
ryanlol 7y ago
These are also primarily businesses you never knew about, so what?
darawk 7y ago
All of the big things on here I already knew were owned by Amazon (Zappos, IMDB, etc.)...all of the small things were trivial clothing imprints or similar. This is a pretty substanceless piece.
- thethirdone 7y ago
  IMDB surprised me, but everything else was a brand I didn't recognize/care about or I already knew.
- bostonpete 7y ago
  Some of them say they were shut down years ago too so I guess this list also includes all their acquisitions (?)
paxys 7y ago
Honestly, there isn't any company on this list that I had heard of before that I didn't already know was owned by Amazon. And most of the list is just brands, not entire companies or businesses.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
pardavis 7y ago
They missed the most interesting ones ;)
whymauri 7y ago
Amazon sold Curse to Wikia Inc.
vermilingua 7y ago
> Alexa Internet: Acquired by Amazon in 1999, this Amazon subsidiary, based in California, provides companies with commercial web traffic data and analytics. Interesting (and entirely unsurprising, really) that the “personal assistant” was (probably) named after a data gathering/analytics company.
gigama 7y ago
Years ago got an account with Abebooks because I didn't like Amazon keeping such a detailed list of every book I ever thought to read or bought as a gift for someone else. Then I found out Abebooks is still Amazon. (Didn't have this list to refer to back then.) Closed that account and now buy my books through Alibris and the used bookstore by the university. Feels good to support independent booksellers and resist the Amazon-Borg collective.
cek 7y ago
Missing a large number of AWS brands. S3, EC2, Sumarian, ...
novaleaf 7y ago
TenMarks (kids education) was actually quite good. It has been shuttered recently. For some reason it was institutional focus only, and getting a family license was quite expensive. too bad all that high quality edu content is gone now :(

168 points by snooty 7y ago

It's a natural trend within retail marketplaces to move from selling other people's products to selling your own. You need the wide range to begin with to be useful enough that people use you, but retail can be low margin, and margin is a very important metric to optimise retail businesses, so it makes sense to introduce your own products that "cut out the middleman" so you can have a bigger share of the margin on those products. India has introduced an interesting law that prohibits this practice – a retailer can either be a marketplace with no products of their own, or they can sell their products and not others. They can't be both, as it's seen as creating bad incentives for companies. I think India may be taking it too far, and I think there are many business that provide value to consumers, but which depend on being able to blend together products at different margins. However I suspect we will see legal battles and/or legislation in Europe soon, as we have with cases like Google allegedly ranking Google services above competing services in Google results (a case with many parallels). Disclaimer, I work for a "marketplace" that sells its own products alongside those from partners.

notafraudster 7y ago
How did India unwind existing retailers? And, as a side question, what prevents retailers from doing a stupid shell company game where the product line and the retail arm are minimally legally separated but still totally the same company? I ask these not to do a "gotcha", but because this is the first I'm hearing of this and it's fascinating and I'd like to know more.
- danpalmer 7y ago
  I'm afraid I don't know all the details. This article has some info: https://thenextweb.com/in/2019/02/01/heres-why-amazon-cant-sell-its-own-products-in-india-right-now/ https://thenextweb.com/in/2019/02/01/heres-why-amazon-cant-s...
- notmyaccount 7y ago
  Amazon and Flipkart used its business power in India to buy up thousands of products in bulk, sell them to vendors on their platforms, and then allow those vendors to offer the same products to customers. They also used to offer to cover vendor losses for discounts on its site using their dollar might at a loss to themselves. It was a huge incentive for heavily cost-conscious Indian consumers as an incentive to move from offline marketplace to online marketplace. This was very important in a pre-dominantly cash oriented conservative Indian market where consumers were reluctant to purchase things online due to fear of fraud. In addition to this, they started offering 0% cost financing for 6 months to purchase the products at installments without any interest rate with or without credit cards. However, what it is doing is driving offline markets out of the business as they cannot match the discounts offered by these companies. This is the reason trade association complained to the government and government decided to take this action. For example, a smartphone that sells at $400 at offline stores would be available for $350 on Amazon/Flipkart. The cost price of device would be $350 for offline stores. You can also use No Cost financing to purchase the product for monthly payment of $58.33 for 6 months (Totaling $350). Amazon/Flipkart would absorb the interest cost. The losses are obvious as neither Amazon India Inc. (opened 2013) nor Flipkart (opened 2007 and the biggest Indian marketplace bought by Walmart in 2018 for $16 Billion) have made a cent of profit in India. Both Flipkart and Amazon had losses around $500 million for FY17-18, a number expected to go up post Walmart's purchase of Flipkart. Also, Amazon Prime is India is available for $15 a year and includes Amazon Prime Video, Amazon Prime Music and 1 Day Free Standard Shipping with no minimum order. In a country where data is basically free (30GB 4G Data with unlimited calls/messages per month for $2), this also adds to pushing people towards Amazon. On a seperate note, a similar thing is taking place in Indian food delivery market where food delivery companies like Zomato, Swiggy or Ubereats are offering steep continuous discounts of 40-60% forcing delivery restaurants to jump into their ecosystem. The Restaurant association has also approached government with their complaints. For Example, a Sub that sells for $4 would be delivered for $2 including delivery cost. The delivery companies absorbing rest of the costs.
  - LudwigNagasena 7y ago
    Does India not have any anti-dumping / pro-competition laws?
- inapis 7y ago
  They didn’t. Many companies have already found loopholes. Amazon, Flipkart and Big Bazaar have their own in house labels for sale
inapis 7y ago
Even then amazon and flipkart have their own in-house brands on the their websites. And Big Bazaar (akin to Walmart) sells its own in house items under different names. They’ve already found loopholes.

massysett 7y ago

Not very useful. Many of the listings have “Amazon” in the name so it’s obvious who owns them. Most of the rest are branded items, which isn’t the same as a “business” because I think most people know that retailers sell branded items, and besides, Amazon prominently identifies many of these, such as “Pinzon by Amazon”. So really all that is left is maybe half a dozen items, like Zappos and Whole Foods.

jammygit 7y ago
Had no idea that goodreads and IMDb were amazon
- acgh213 7y ago
  IMDb surprised me at first, but goodreads was openly discussed on the site when Amazon took over.
- manojlds 7y ago
  IMDB prominently used in Prime Videos and the site explicitly says An Amazon Company. Compare that to Zappos - more difficult to find.
  - jdsully 7y ago
    When Zappos was acquired they made a big deal about keeping their unique culture.
obmelvin 7y ago
Eh, I think it can be useful to others. Your point about Amazon being explicitly part of some of the names is certainly fair. However, a few months ago I saw something on HN that has had me informally polling friends to see if they know who owns YouTube. I find it so obviously owned by Google, but to my surprise most of my friends I've asked didn't know (20s, some of them in PhD programs). Well aware this is not a statistically valid poll, but my point is that there are at least some well educated people who have no clue about some of these corporate relationships.

cardamomo 7y ago

I have the most bizarre sensation when reading through this. On one level, they're just boring brand names. But knowing that they were all created by Amazon for Purposes and their names chosen presumedly by marketing folks... Well, it sorta makes this read like the most genius piece of satire about today's retail marketplace. It would fit somewhere between McSweeny's lists[0] and AI-written paint color names[1] [0] https://www.mcsweeneys.net/columns/lists https://www.mcsweeneys.net/columns/lists [1] https://aiweirdness.com/post/160776374467/new-paint-colors-invented-by-neural-network https://aiweirdness.com/post/160776374467/new-paint-colors-i...

oska 7y ago
They weren't all created by Amazon. Quite a number of them are acquisitions, e.g. AbeBooks, Book Depository, Goodreads and IMDb.
- cardamomo 7y ago
  Right, I'm familiar with those. I'm thinking of the many clothing brands in particular. They all sound almost plausible. I found this search helpful in verifying which brand names were created directly by Amazon and which (like Goodreads) were acquired companies: https://trademarks.justia.com/owners/amazon-technologies-inc-2452347/ https://trademarks.justia.com/owners/amazon-technologies-inc...

kyle-rb 7y ago

The clothing one "Goodthreads" sounds like sort of a play on their existing GoodReads brand. I'm disappointed there weren't more like this: Slumberyard for pajamas, Fruit 53 for produce, Breadshift for baked goods, etc.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

andrewstuart 7y ago

When does the organisation lose so much focus that it all becomes very ordinary.

jim-jim-jim 7y ago

It's also worth mentioning that Bezos owns the Washington Post, which may help explain the paper's well-documented hostility to Bernie Sanders: https://fair.org/home/washington-post-ran-16-negative-stories-on-bernie-sanders-in-16-hours/ https://fair.org/home/washington-post-ran-16-negative-storie...

yumraj 7y ago

It's interesting to contrast between Amazon and Costco strategy as far as the store brands go. Costco has 1 store brand, Kirkland, that they are open about and in fact push it as a equal/better brand. Amazon on the other hand has the Amazon Basics as an economy brand but also have these numerous hidden brands.

arien 7y ago
I'm guessing it's some kind of A/B testing done by Amazon. Do people trust in the Amazon brand, or do they rather buy from unknown brands that offer cheap but decent quality (compared to the cheap and poor quality counterparts that flood the site)? Each brand is probably there to answer a specific question (or set of).
Sherl 7y ago
I think Costco is built on baby boomers and it become a cult to spend time in warehouse, walking through huge aisles, discovering those treasures and samples. Amazon on other hand needs economies of scale by constantly sending you notifications or keeping track of your habits. Costco also uses the same strategy to comeup with products. I used to see GT Kombucha and now costco has their own line of Kombucha as well. This is similar to Amazon where you observe the products at someones cost and make it inhouse if its viable. Another fact with Costco the costs being low is the businesses that sell at costco can only have as much as 20% of their total revenue from Costco -- which is like paying only for the variable cost as the rest 80% of revenue would absorb that fixed costs in supply chain. This is a huge bonus.

blackflame7000 7y ago

So how is this different than standard oil again? Not that I'm advocating breaking up the tech companies but it's no coincidence that the growth of the modern conglomerate has also strongly correlated with income disparity. Instead of 5 CEOs and 25 VPs, you now have 1 CEO, 5 VPs, and 25 Junior VPs all being paid less because they no longer get the same share of the equity.

damagednoob 7y ago
From what I understand, Standard Oil used their dominance in the market to stifle competition and 'restrain trade'. Because Amazon is big doesn't necessarily mean they are doing these things. I would imagine they are being very careful not to fall foul of these laws, unlike Microsoft in 2001.
- blackflame7000 7y ago
  There’s certainly a argument to be made on stifling competition if even Walmart has trouble keeping up. What hope do small to moderate regional retail stores have? All that regional wealth is sucked up online and redistributed to a few managers of mangers instead of actually making the communities better by allowing people to own a part of it. The biggest problem that’s causing income disparity is that people are consuming things rather than owning things.

ryanlol 7y ago

These are also primarily businesses you never knew about, so what?

darawk 7y ago

All of the big things on here I already knew were owned by Amazon (Zappos, IMDB, etc.)...all of the small things were trivial clothing imprints or similar. This is a pretty substanceless piece.

thethirdone 7y ago
IMDB surprised me, but everything else was a brand I didn't recognize/care about or I already knew.
bostonpete 7y ago
Some of them say they were shut down years ago too so I guess this list also includes all their acquisitions (?)

paxys 7y ago

Honestly, there isn't any company on this list that I had heard of before that I didn't already know was owned by Amazon. And most of the list is just brands, not entire companies or businesses.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

pardavis 7y ago

They missed the most interesting ones ;)

whymauri 7y ago

Amazon sold Curse to Wikia Inc.

vermilingua 7y ago

> Alexa Internet: Acquired by Amazon in 1999, this Amazon subsidiary, based in California, provides companies with commercial web traffic data and analytics. Interesting (and entirely unsurprising, really) that the “personal assistant” was (probably) named after a data gathering/analytics company.

gigama 7y ago

Years ago got an account with Abebooks because I didn't like Amazon keeping such a detailed list of every book I ever thought to read or bought as a gift for someone else. Then I found out Abebooks is still Amazon. (Didn't have this list to refer to back then.) Closed that account and now buy my books through Alibris and the used bookstore by the university. Feels good to support independent booksellers and resist the Amazon-Borg collective.

cek 7y ago

Missing a large number of AWS brands. S3, EC2, Sumarian, ...

novaleaf 7y ago

TenMarks (kids education) was actually quite good. It has been shuttered recently. For some reason it was institutional focus only, and getting a family license was quite expensive. too bad all that high quality edu content is gone now :(