Empowerment

Small and medium-sized businesses selling in Amazon’s stores come from every state in the U.S., and more than 130 countries around the world. Amazon works with more than 2 million independent partners in the U.S., including sellers, developers, content creators, authors, and delivery providers. We openly share information, tools, and services with third parties who work with Amazon to foster their business growth. When they thrive, our customers benefit from the products and services they offer.

Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in 1995 as a bookstore, with the goal to offer the Earth’s biggest selection of books. In fact, that’s where our name came from. We wanted our selection to be vast and wide—like the Amazon River. Books, and supporting authors, remain core to what we do. Millions of writers around the world use Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) to build successful careers with self-publishing. And, Amazon Publishing is a leading trade publisher of fiction, nonfiction, and children’s books.

Amazon Web Services provides a highly reliable, scalable, low-cost infrastructure platform in the cloud that powers hundreds of thousands of businesses in 190 countries around the world—from the fastest-growing startups and largest enterprises, to nonprofits and government agencies. In 2020, AWS customers began helping local businesses operate through the complexities of COVID-19, and empowering neighbors to stay connected and assist each other while remaining safe.

Launched in 2018, there are now more than 1,700 Delivery Service Partners across the U.S., Canada, UK, Spain, and Germany who have created over 100,000 jobs in their communities. They’ve delivered more than 2.2 billion packages worldwide and generated over $5 billion in revenue for their small businesses. In 2020, we announced a new diversity grant to help reduce the barriers to entry for Black, Latinx, and Native American entrepreneurs—a $1 million commitment toward funding startup costs, offering $10,000 for each qualified candidate to build their own businesses in the U.S.