“For US retailers big and small, Amazon has become the preeminent place to sell products, rivaled only by eBay and Walmart’s competing marketplaces and smaller, more product-specific platforms like Etsy and Overstock.com,” Nick Statt reports for The Verge. “Yet none of Amazon’s competitors offer the same robust logistics and shipping benefits the company offers its sellers, making it a top destination for online businesses.”
“Companies that want to sell Apple products through Amazon now have to meet one of two requirements. The first is to purchase at least $2.5 million worth of refurbished inventory every 90 days from Apple itself or through a retailer with more than $5 billion in annual sales, like a wireless carrier or big-box retailers like Target or Walmart,” Statt reports. “The second is to reach out directly to Apple to become an authorized reseller. Apple has yet to make its reseller requirements known to the public, but to become an Apple-authorized provider of repairs requires a physical retail space for customers to enter.”
Statt reports, “By cutting this deal, Apple and Amazon benefit while knocking out millions of dollars worth of business for small sellers.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple obviously wants as much uniformity in, and control of, the sales experience of their products as possible..
Apple and Amazon are strange bedfellows.
What’s so laughable is how the Apple bulls used to boast about how little profit Amazon made and how Apple was simply blowing Amazon away in value. Now, look at Apple struggling to sell iPhones and hold up its revenue from collapsing in a heap. Meanwhile, Amazon is just breezing along as a growth machine and easily leaving Apple in the dust.
All those years of Apple simply coasting along and holding all that cash in a bank while Jeff Bezos was buying into every business market possible in order to grow Amazon into a near monopoly. That’s the difference in CEOs and company objectives. I’m sure Amazon will benefit from this deal more than Apple will. Amazon will probably want to sell more Apple products on Amazon than Apple does.
Amazon is going to be a huge winner while Apple becomes an also-ran with Tim Cook’s main goal of trying to increase profits while losing a huge amount of market share. I wonder if the Apple bulls are still foolishly laughing at Amazon’s small profits. As a long-term Apple shareholder, I see nothing worthwhile to laugh about as Amazon outdistances Apple in overall value and mindshare. It’s quite disappointing to see Amazon run rings around Apple when Apple had such a clear-cut advantage over the last five years.
I really like Apple but I really don’t understand why Apple has no interest in growth when there is so much opportunity for them. They shouldn’t have to struggle at all to grow revenue or at least keep it stable.
Just one more step towards making Apple Stores primarily showrooms and service centers.
So, sell your AAPL and buy Amazon. Simple. I did.