Amazon.com, Inc.

Amazon.com, Inc. is what people reach for when they want a giant online marketplace with third-party sellers, Prime, fast delivery, cloud computing through AWS and Kindle on the device side. By our assessment, its big advantage is that it combines retail scale with logistics, search, payments and subscription glue in one place. The trade-off is familiar too: the marketplace can feel crowded, product quality varies by seller, and the whole system asks customers and merchants to live inside Amazon's rules. In practice it is a place for convenience, but also a place where you sort through listings, reviews and shipping options more than you would in a simple store. It sits at the top of e-commerce and, through AWS, also matters in enterprise tech, which is why it is so hard to compare with ordinary retailers. Amazon.com, Inc. is broad enough to be a store, a delivery network and a cloud platform at once, and that combination is what makes it hard to ignore.