unlike Whole Foods Amazon has no particular desire to be a grocer, and contrary to conventional wisdom the company is not even a retailer. At its core Amazon is a services provider enabled — and protected — by scale.
与Whole Foods不同的是，亚马逊并不特别希望成为一家杂货店，而且与传统观念相反，该公司甚至不是一家零售商。亚马逊的核心是一个服务提供商，它通过规模来提供服务并受到保护。
E-commerce distribution has massive fixed costs but benefits tremendously from economies of scale The cost to build-out Amazon’s fulfillment centers was justified because the first and best customer is Amazon’s e-commerce business That last bullet point may seem odd, but in fact 40% of Amazon’s sales (on a unit basis) are sold by 3rd-party merchants; most of these merchants leverage Fulfilled-by-Amazon, which means their goods are stored in Amazon’s fulfillment centers and covered by Prime. This increases the return to scale for Amazon’s fulfillment centers, increases the value of Prime, and deepens Amazon’s moat