Amazon’s booming marketplace is a primary source of tension between Amazon and other companies. Over the holiday months in 2012, 39 percent of products sold on Amazon were brokered over its third-party marketplace, up from 36 percent the year before. The company said that over two million third-party sellers worldwide used Amazon Marketplace and that they sold 40 percent more products in 2012 than in 2011.11 The Marketplace business is a profitable one for the company, since it takes a flat 6 to 15 percent commission on each sale and does not bear the expense of buying and holding the
...more
