In the United States, almost one in five online shoppers profited from Amazon Prime Day deals to stock up on items that got more expensive because of inflation in 2022. According to a poll, over one-third of the surveyed U.S. consumers even waited for Amazon Prime in order to purchase a product at a lower price. Overall, the inflation rate had no effect on a limited share of consumers – less than 20 percent.

In the time preceding Amazon Prime Day 2023, product price inflation deterred more than one in two U.S. shoppers, a survey revealed. One in four surveyed respondents were discouraged from shopping online due to rising interest rates, while another 18 percent of U.S. Prime members opted for travel and experiences' purchases.

The combined number of full- and part-time employees of Amazon.com has increased significantly since 2017. Amazon’s headcount peaked in 2021 when the American multinational e-commerce company employed 1,608,000 full- and part-time employees, not counting external contractors. However, in 2024, the number dropped to 1,556,000. E-commerce crunch The workforce reduction of Amazon follows the mass layoffs hitting the entire e-commerce sector. With the full reopening of physical stores after the COVID-19 pandemic, online shopping demand decreased, leading online retailers to restructure their businesses, including personnel costs. Diversifying business With online retail sales growing slower due to recession and inflation, Amazon can still leverage other profitable revenue segments — from media subscriptions to server hosting and cloud services. On top of that, in 2023 Amazon monitored small enterprises operating in different fields and strategically invested in them, as disclosed startup acquisitions indicate.

In November 2024, Inflation increased slightly by 2.7 percent since November 2023. However, core inflation has held more steady, remaining unchanged since November 2023.

The price of Amazon shares traded on the Nasdaq stock exchange fluctuated significantly but increased for the most part during the period between 2010 and 2025, peaking at 237.68 U.S. dollar per share in January 2025. Expansion during the pandemic Due to the rise of online shopping worldwide during the Covid-19 pandemic, Amazon's share prices saw an increase as the company experienced dramatic growth. As a result, the company's net sales revenue increased by almost 400 billion U.S. dollars between 2019 to 2024, growing ever since. However, the surge in Amazon's operations significantly increased the company's fulfillment expenses and shipping costs after 2020. The shift towards offline shopping and cost increases after the pandemic resulted in significant layoffs in 2022. Amazon Web Services Amazon is not only the world's most valuable retailer but also the leader in the cloud computing industry through Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS is a platform that offers storage, servers, and networking to individuals, businesses, and organizations. Amazon's success is driven by its excellence in diverse sectors, but AWS stands as the primary source of profit. The cloud service has consistently grown in profitability, generating nearly 40 billion U.S. dollars in profit in 2024.

This is not going to be an article or Op-Ed about Michael Jordan. Since 2009 we've been in the longest bull-market in history, that's 11 years and counting. However a few metrics like the stock market P/E, the call to put ratio and of course the Shiller P/E suggest a great crash is coming in-between the levels of 1929 and the dot.com bubble. Mean reversion historically is inevitable and the Fed's printing money experiment could end in disaster for the stock market in late 2021 or 2022. You can read Jeremy Grantham's Last Dance article here. You are likely well aware of Michael Burry's predicament as well. It's easier for you just to skim through two related videos on this topic of a stock market crash. Michael Burry's Warning see this YouTube. Jeremy Grantham's Warning See this YouTube. Typically when there is a major event in the world, there is a crash and then a bear market and a recovery that takes many many months. In March, 2020 that's not what we saw since the Fed did some astonishing things that means a liquidity sloth and the risk of a major inflation event. The pandemic represented the quickest decline of at least 30% in the history of the benchmark S&P 500, but the recovery was not correlated to anything but Fed intervention. Since the pandemic clearly isn't disappearing and many sectors such as travel, business travel, tourism and supply chain disruptions appear significantly disrupted - the so-called economic recovery isn't so great. And there's this little problem at the heart of global capitalism today, the stock market just keeps going up. Crashes and corrections typically occur frequently in a normal market. But the Fed liquidity and irresponsible printing of money is creating a scenario where normal behavior isn't occurring on the markets. According to data provided by market analytics firm Yardeni Research, the benchmark index has undergone 38 declines of at least 10% since the beginning of 1950. Since March, 2020 we've barely seen a down month. September, 2020 was flat-ish. The S&P 500 has more than doubled since those lows. Look at the angle of the curve: The S&P 500 was 735 at the low in 2009, so in this bull market alone it has gone up 6x in valuation. That's not a normal cycle and it could mean we are due for an epic correction. I have to agree with the analysts who claim that the long, long bull market since 2009 has finally matured into a fully-fledged epic bubble. There is a complacency, buy-the dip frenzy and general meme environment to what BigTech can do in such an environment. The weight of Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Facebook, Nvidia and Tesla together in the S&P and Nasdaq is approach a ridiculous weighting. When these stocks are seen both as growth, value and companies with unbeatable moats the entire dynamics of the stock market begin to break down. Check out FANG during the pandemic. BigTech is Seen as Bullet-Proof me valuations and a hysterical speculative behavior leads to even higher highs, even as 2020 offered many younger people an on-ramp into investing for the first time. Some analysts at JP Morgan are even saying that until retail investors stop charging into stocks, markets probably don’t have too much to worry about. Hedge funds with payment for order flows can predict exactly how these retail investors are behaving and monetize them. PFOF might even have to be banned by the SEC. The risk-on market theoretically just keeps going up until the Fed raises interest rates, which could be in 2023! For some context, we're more than 1.4 years removed from the bear-market bottom of the coronavirus crash and haven't had even a 5% correction in nine months. This is the most over-priced the market has likely ever been. At the night of the dot-com bubble the S&P 500 was only 1,400. Today it is 4,500, not so many years after. Clearly something is not quite right if you look at history and the P/E ratios. A market pumped with liquidity produces higher earnings with historically low interest rates, it's an environment where dangerous things can occur. In late 1997, as the S&P 500 passed its previous 1929 peak of 21x earnings, that seemed like a lot, but nothing compared to today. For some context, the S&P 500 Shiller P/E closed last week at 38.58, which is nearly a two-decade high. It's also well over double the average Shiller P/E of 16.84, dating back 151 years. So the stock market is likely around 2x over-valued. Try to think rationally about what this means for valuations today and your favorite stock prices, what should they be in historical terms? The S&P 500 is up 31% in the past year. It will likely hit 5,000 before a correction given the amount of added liquidity to the system and the QE the Fed is using that's like a huge abuse of MMT, or Modern Monetary Theory. This has also lent to bubbles in the housing market, crypto and even commodities like Gold with long-term global GDP meeting many headwinds in the years ahead due to a demographic shift of an ageing population and significant technological automation. So if you think that stocks or equities or ETFs are the best place to put your money in 2022, you might want to think again. The crash of the OTC and small-cap market since February 2021 has been quite an indication of what a correction looks like. According to the Motley Fool what happens after major downturns in the market historically speaking? In each of the previous four instances that the S&P 500's Shiller P/E shot above and sustained 30, the index lost anywhere from 20% to 89% of its value. So what's what we too are due for, reversion to the mean will be realistically brutal after the Fed's hyper-extreme intervention has run its course. Of course what the Fed stimulus has really done is simply allowed the 1% to get a whole lot richer to the point of wealth inequality spiraling out of control in the decades ahead leading us likely to a dystopia in an unfair and unequal version of BigTech capitalism. This has also led to a trend of short squeeze to these tech stocks, as shown in recent years' data. Of course the Fed has to say that's its done all of these things for the people, employment numbers and the labor market. Women in the workplace have been set behind likely 15 years in social progress due to the pandemic and the Fed's response. While the 89% lost during the Great Depression would be virtually impossible today thanks to ongoing intervention from the Federal Reserve and Capitol Hill, a correction of 20% to 50% would be pretty fair and simply return the curve back to a normal trajectory as interest rates going back up eventually in the 2023 to 2025 period. It's very unlikely the market has taken Fed tapering into account (priced-in), since the euphoria of a can't miss market just keeps pushing the markets higher. But all good things must come to an end. Earlier this month, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released inflation data from July. This report showed that the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers rose 5.2% over the past 12 months. While the Fed and economists promise us this inflation is temporary, others are not so certain. As you print so much money, the money you have is worth less and certain goods cost more. Wage gains in some industries cannot be taken back, they are permanent - in the service sector like restaurants, hospitality and travel that have been among the hardest hit. The pandemic has led to a paradigm shift in the future of work, and that too is not temporary. The Great Resignation means white collar jobs with be more WFM than ever before, with a new software revolution, different transport and energy behaviors and so forth. Climate change alone could slow down global GDP in the 21st century. How can inflation be temporary when so many trends don't appear to be temporary? Sure the price of lumber or used-cars could be temporary, but a global chip shortage is exasperating the automobile sector. The stock market isn't even behaving like it cares about anything other than the Fed, and its $billions of dollars of buying bonds each month. Some central banks will start to taper about December, 2021 (like the European). However Delta could further mutate into a variant that makes the first generation of vaccines less effective. Such a macro event could be enough to trigger the correction we've been speaking about. So stay safe, and keep your money safe. The Last Dance of the 2009 bull market could feel especially more painful because we've been spoiled for so long in the markets. We can barely remember what March, 2020 felt like. Some people sold their life savings simply due to scare tactics by the likes of Bill Ackman. His scare tactics on CNBC won him likely hundreds of millions as the stock market tanked. Hedge funds further gamed the Reddit and Gamestop movement, orchestrating them and leading the new retail investors into meme speculation and a whole bunch of other unsavory things like options trading at such scale we've never seen before. It's not just inflation and higher interest rates, it's how absurdly high valuations have become. Still correlation does not imply causation. Just because inflation has picked up, it doesn't guarantee that stocks will head lower. Nevertheless, weaker buying power associated with higher inflation can't be overlooked as a potential negative for the U.S. economy and equities. The current S&P500 10-year P/E Ratio is 38.7. This is 97% above the modern-era market average of 19.6, putting the current P/E 2.5 standard deviations above the modern-era average. This is just math, folks. History is saying the stock market is 2x its true value. So why and who would be full on the market or an asset class like crypto that is mostly speculative in nature to begin with? Study the following on a historical basis, and due your own due diligence as to the health of the markets: Debt-to-GDP ratio Call to put ratio

In 2023, the usual median hourly rate of a worker's wage in the United States was 19.24 U.S. dollars, a decrease from the previous year. Dollar value is based on 2023 U.S. dollars. In 1979, the median hourly earnings in the U.S. was 17.48 dollars.

Increased use of in-store retail channels, rising inflation, and supply chain crises are slowing down e-commerce growth. Several companies operating in this sector have had to downsize and have announced layoffs throughout 2023. The biggest of these, Amazon, laid off 9,000 employees in March 2023 and 8,000 two months earlier, representing the largest layoff together with Shopify, which laid off 2,300 employees in May 2023.

As of January 2024, the tech startup with the most layoffs was Amazon, with over 27 thousand layoffs, across five separate rounds of layoffs. It was followed by Meta and Google with around 21 thousand and 12 thousand job cuts announced respectively.

Layoffs in in the technology industry

Overall, layoffs across all industries began in 2020 due to the outbreak of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, with tech layoffs increasing in 2022. In the first quarter of 2023 alone, more than 167 thousand employees had been fired worldwide, a record number of job cuts in a single quarter and more than all of the layoffs announced in 2022 combined, marking a harsh start to of 2023 for the tech sector. From retail to finance and education, all sectors are suffering from this widespread downsizing. However, retail tech startups were hit the most, with almost 29 thousand layoffs announced as of September 2023. Most job losses happened in the United States, where tech giants like Amazon, Meta, and Google are based.

Reasons behind increasing tech layoffs

Layoffs in the technology sector started with the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 when entire cities were in lockdown and mobility was restricted. Although restrictions loosened up in 2021, events such as the Russia-Ukraine war, the downturn in Chinese production, and rising inflation had a significant impact on the tech industry and continue to represent major concerns for tech companies. As a consequence, companies across the world have yet to overcome all economic challenges, examples of which are rising material and labor costs, as well as decreasing profit margins. To address such difficulties, tech companies have appointed business plans. For instance, in the United States, tech firms planned to focus more on consumer retention, automating software, and cutting operating expenses.

The Coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic has led to tectonic shifts in the retail sector in such a short period of time. With consumers rushing to the shops and online marketplaces to stock up on a variety of products, the usual prices have seen drastic spikes, especially on online marketplaces which allow 3rd party sellers to trade.

Between March 16-19, 2020, when the crisis was beginning to peak in so many countries, the listed price of hand lotion products on both eBay.co.uk and Amazon.co.uk saw great spikes, as a recent study revealed. The price of Carex hand lotion (250 ml) was listed as high as 100 British pounds by sellers on eBay's UK platform. The usual price of this product was only 1 British pound.

For further information about the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, please visit our dedicated Fact and Figures page.

In 2023, Germany recorded nearly 80 billion euros in gross revenue from e-commerce goods, according to the German E-commerce and Distance Selling Trade Association (bevh). This statistic highlights a comparison of market evaluations conducted by bevh and the German Retail Association (HDE) concerning the development of the German online retail sector. Online retail industries The growth of online markets and retail is primarily fueled by certain industries. While some categories, like groceries, are still predominantly purchased in physical stores, sectors such as electronics, fashion & accessories, and fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) have become most dominant in the online space. Electronics, in particular, held a significant share of online retail, outperforming other categories in terms of sales volume. Online marketplaces In 2021, e-commerce accounted for around 27 percent of total retail sales in Germany, with projections indicating this share could exceed one-third by 2026. The top online marketplace by net sales in Germany was amazon.de, followed by German online retail companies otto.de and zalando.de. While these platforms have seen consistent growth, online retailers have faced numerous challenges in recent years. Nearly three-quarters of online retailers viewed inflation in Europe and its impact on consumer spending as one of the most pressing issues.

Im Jahr 2024 wies Amazon dank erneutem Rekordumsatz einen Gewinn in Höhe von rund 59,3 Milliarden US-Dollar auf. Neben den überaus erfolgreichen Schnäppchenaktionen im vierten Quartal ist dieser vornehmlich dem Erfolg des Segments Amazon Web Services (AWS) zuzuschreiben. Der Gewinn beinhaltet zudem einen Bewertungsgewinn in Höhe von 1,6 Milliarden US-Dollar aus der Beteiligung an Rivian Automotive. Im Jahr 2019 traf Amazon mit Rivian die Vereinbarung, 100.000 Elektro-Lieferfahrzeuge bis zum Jahr 2030 abzunehmen und ist seitdem einer der größten Shareholder des Unternehmens. Kennzahlen zu Rivian Rivian Automotive Inc. wurde im Jahr 2009 gegründet und hat seinen Sitz in Plymouth, USA. Der Hersteller von E-Autos konnte im dritten Quartal 2024 einen Umsatz von 874 Millionen US-Dollar verzeichnen und wies einen Verlust in Höhe von knapp 1,1 Milliarden US-Dollar aus. Das Unternehmen wird häufig als Tesla-Konkurrent bezeichnet, wenn sich auch die von Rivian fokussierten SUVs und Pick-Ups nicht auf Teslas Produktpalette befinden. Wie geht es Amazon 2024? Nach dem ernüchternden Jahresergebnis 2022 ist es Amazon im Jahr 2024 gelungen, seine Marktmacht enorm zu stärken und dies auch in den Geschäftszahlen widerzuspiegeln. Entgegen dem allgemeinen Abwärtstrend im Onlinehandel aufgrund von Inflation und Kaufzurückhaltung konnte der E-Commerce-Riese erneut Rekordzahlen vorweisen. Gelingen konnte dies aufgrund durchdachter Marketingstrategien, in welche Amazon insbesondere im vierten Quartal für die beliebten Schnäppchenevents Prime Day, Black Friday und Cyber Monday investierte. Diese lockten Kunden an, die auf der Suche nach Weihnachtsgeschenken oder überfälligen Anschaffungen Schnäppchen witterten. Angesichts der zahlreichen neuen oder erweiterten namhaften Partner, die Amazons Web Services unter anderem für die Entwicklung von KI-Tools nutzen, ist auch für das kommende Jahr mit Erfolgsumsätzen in diesem Segment zu rechnen.

Across all product categories, Amazon was the place where online shoppers in the United States most often began searching for specific products in 2022. For household products, 45 percent of shoppers reported beginning their searching on the e-commerce giant's platform. Additionally, 23 percent started their household item searches on Walmart's online platform. Fashion e-commerce in the U.S. The internet, social media, and the proliferation of inexpensive clothing have opened doors to U.S. fashion e-commerce like never before. The U.S. apparel, footwear, and accessories retail e-commerce market is worth a remarkable 124 billion U.S. dollars, according to 2021 estimates, and it is set to surpass the 150 billion dollar mark by 2025. Millennials shaping the future of U.S. e-commerce In general, Millennials are hyper-connected and better educated than previous generations. Over the past decade, they have become the largest generation group in the U.S. Also known as Generation Y, Millennials are more tech-savvy consumers than their antecessors. In 2019, people born between 1983 and 1998 were found to be more influenced by bloggers when buying apparel than previous generations. Millennials also outrank Gen X-ers and baby boomers in digital buyer penetration in the United States, with over 86 percent as of May 2020.

Amazon.com führt den globalen E-Commerce Markt mit einem Umsatz von knapp 139 Milliarden US-Dollar in 2023 an, gefolgt von jd.com mit rund 116 Milliarden US-Dollar. Auf dem dritten Platz liegt walmart.com mit einem Umsatz in Höhe von rund 65 Milliarden US-Dollar. Für weitere Informationen besuchen Sie ecommerceDB.com.

Entwicklungen im globalen E-Commerce Nach dem Pandemie-Hoch im Jahr 2021 waren die Umsätze im E-Commerce weltweit zuletzt leicht rückläufig, was auf diverse globale Krisen und den resultierenden Kaufkraftverlust zurückzuführen ist. Prognosen zufolge wird sich der Markt jedoch schnell erholen und bereits im Jahr 2024 sollen erneut Rekordumsätze erwirtschaftet werden. Das Segment "Mode" bleibt dabei weiterhin das Umsatzstärkste. Amazon - Fels in der Brandung? Während beispielsweise der deutsche Onlinehandel erst Mitte des Jahres 2024 auf eine Verbesserung der Umsatzentwicklung hofft, die zuletzt aufgrund von Kaufzurückhaltung und Inflation stark eingebrochen war, verzeichnet Amazon ungehemmt weitere Rekordzahlen. Das liegt zum einen an Amazons B2B-Geschäft mit den Amazon Web Services - denn der B2B-Handel präsentiert sich in den aktuellen Krisenzeiten deutlich resistenter als B2C. Zum anderen boomt Amazons Marktplatz-Geschäft, den Händler können hier gerade in der angespannten wirtschaftlichen Lage Kosten sparen und von der enormen Reichweite von Amazon profitieren.