With the increasing penetration of Internet amidst the world population, more and more marketers as well as consumers are adopting the platform of E-commerce which has simply revolutionized the retail trade on this universal pulpit. The trade analysts have forecasted the Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of the Global E-commerce platform to be 13.54 percent over the year 2013-2018 which demonstrates the expanding realms of this market segment. One of the key players which can be attributed as the prime booster of this electronic market is the tech giant Amazon Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) whose logo only depicts that it sells everything from A to Z.
The giant leap of Amazon
E-commerce approximately accounts for 12% of the world’s retail trade and this proportion is assumed to double up in the coming decade, but the retail mega-giant Amazon is actually thriving at a whopping pace of three times the rate of comprehensive e-commerce growth rate and hence has emerged as the skyrocket in gaining the market shares in this sector.
Amazon has been already the leader of the American retail business. It’s the 35th largest company in the US in terms of market capitalization and also enjoys the status of being the ninth largest retailer in the nation, which is till now the largest Internet retail revenue-generator with the total sales growth in the Financial Year of 2012-2013 reaching $43,962,000. But the future prospects of growth for Amazon behold in the markets of the developing nations of China, India and Latin America where the E-commerce revenue exceeded the mark of $185 billion in 2012, expanding at a fast rate of 44% in contrast to the 14% growth in the US during the same time span.
Initiated by Jeff Bezos in 1994 as an online bookstore, Amazon has been the quickest in advancing itself from the limitability of desktop computers to the world of mobile phones and tablets. The launch of the first Kindle, a series of e-book readers and then the Kindle Fire is revamping it to the mini tablet computer version helped the company beat their 2012 first quarter estimates first time ever and now with the commencement of Fire TV, the company is moving even deeper into the deep digital business. Amazon registered an increase of 12.2% in its worldwide media sales (including e-books, DVDs, CDs, music and more) in the fourth quarter and in the long run the company estimates approximately 90% of its media sales to be digital and this digitization has really helped Amazon to stand tall among its tech rivals.
Amazon- the emerging third-party marketplace
The Amazon’s entry into the Business-to Business sector with the cloud computing services has largely increased its affluence and in the recent times its major concentration has been in leasing out of server space at its large data centers all over the globe so that the small entrepreneurs don’t have to risk such upfront capital investment.  
It has also expanded substantially its third-party marketplace wherein the vendors can set up their own virtual online stores on Amazon.com and sell their products parallel to Amazon. Indeed, the third party retailers now account for 40% to 50% of the total products that Amazon sells each year generating 10-15 percent of its total revenue. These all new developments have exponentially protracted Amazon’s economic reputation beyond its tech competitors like Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL), Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL) and  Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ:FB)
Amazon.in and its contemporary competitors
Amazon in India boasts to provide more than 10 million different products to its customers and its latest announcement of the investment of $2 billion in the Indian Marketplace has made India the fastest country in Amazon’s track to cross the billion dollars gross. The timing of this disclosure just after Flipkart’s revelation of a massive $1 billion fund raising marks the fledging rivalry between the two online mega stores  both of them competing for the larger chunk of the Indian e-commerce market which is expected to reach $56 billion by 2023. Although Flipkart dominates the Indian e-commerce market with close to 22 million registered users, Amazon is set to give a tough competition in coming times to it. Another Indian key company  in this online retail sector is SnapDeal which has so far generated a revenue of $435.7 million.
Amazon’s greater strength is its implicit one-to-one customer relationship, which is invaluable and brings Amazon to the focal center of the growing role of E-commerce in the world and with such manifold strengths, we can expect it to lead this online retail marketing segment surely in the coming times.
