Get ready for Amazon’s growth narrative story to change again. Going back to 2015-2016, everyone lauded Amazon’s cloud offering AWS as the business that will propel their increasingly “expensive” stock price for years to come. Then in 2018 as the Facebook/Google duopoly theme had run its’ course, Amazon’s growth narrative switched to the Amazon Advertising offering which albeit small is incredibly lucrative and will continue to steal share from Facebook and Google for the foreseeable future.

With today’s earnings, the new narrative will become the revenue from the various third party sellers on the Amazon platform. As most of you know, nearly 60% of what is sold on Amazon isn’t owned by Amazon. That 60% is either consigned to Amazon from a seller or the seller ships the order directly to the customer. Each of those sellers rely on Amazon for a marketplace with a captive audience of customers. Some of those sellers rely on Amazon to ship their product to the customer or take their returns. All of that business is incredibly lucrative, grew 30% year over year in the latest quarter and continues to accelerate, is nearly 4x times larger than the Amazon Advertising business and provides a halo effect on the goods Amazon truly owns and sells.

The change in narrative will only continue to propel this dominant eCommerce player higher.