A list of Amazon’s businesses and subsidiaries
It&#x27;s a natural trend within retail marketplaces to move from selling other people&#x27;s products to selling your own. You need the wide range to begin with to be useful enough that people use you, but retail can be low margin, and margin is a very important metric to optimise retail businesses, so it makes sense to introduce your own products that &quot;cut out the middleman&quot; so you can have a bigger share of the margin on those products.<p>India has introduced an interesting law that prohibits this practice – a retailer can either be a marketplace with no products of their own, or they can sell their products and not others. They can&#x27;t be both, as it&#x27;s seen as creating bad incentives for companies.<p>I think India may be taking it too far, and I think there are many business that provide value to consumers, but which depend on being able to blend together products at different margins. However I suspect we will see legal battles and&#x2F;or legislation in Europe soon, as we have with cases like Google allegedly ranking Google services above competing services in Google results (a case with many parallels).<p>Disclaimer, I work for a &quot;marketplace&quot; that sells its own products alongside those from partners.