Bezonomics

Dumaine, a former Fortune editor, wrote an account of Amazon's business model and its effects, based on interviews with executives, competitors, suppliers, workers and analysts.

The model he describes centres on what Amazon calls the flywheel: lower prices attract customers, more customers attract third-party sellers, more sellers widen selection, wider selection attracts more customers, and the resulting scale lowers cost, permitting lower prices. Dumaine adds that machine learning now runs inside every loop, setting prices, forecasting demand, routing inventory, recommending products and allocating advertising, which he argues compounds the advantage in a way that earlier retail scale did not. He treats Prime as the mechanism that converts customers into subscribers whose purchasing shifts almost entirely to the platform, and Amazon Web Services as the profit source that funded a decade of retail investment at low margin.

He also covers the costs: warehouse working conditions and injury rates, the effect on suppliers and on brands that become dependent on the platform, the use of third-party seller data, the effect on physical retail, and the regulatory questions.

The reporting is competent and the book is a reasonable single-volume description of Amazon around 2019. It does not attempt original analysis of the economics and it takes the flywheel framing largely from Amazon's own account of itself. Brad Stone's two books cover the corporate history more thoroughly. It predates the pandemic surge, the union campaigns, the antitrust cases brought in the United States and Europe, and the slowdown and cost reductions that followed, so the treatment of Amazon's trajectory is now dated.