1y ago

ELI5: How is Amazon able to sell me books so much cheaper than brick and mortar book stores in my area

I like shopping in book stores. There's something about wandering the aisles and waiting for a book to jump out at you that I can't get shopping online. Unfortunately, whenever I compare the price of a book Amazon has every in-person store beat, often pricing their offerings 30%-50% lower (or around $10/book in my experience) even when I go to a large chain like Barnes and Noble.

How is it that Amazon is able to afford to offer the books so much cheaper and also support all of the infrastructure involved in shipping it to my doorstep compared with in-person stores?

25 comments

I don't know the full details, but part of it:
In the store you can walk between the books. This takes loads of room. In the Amazon warehouse, this can be veeery cramped.
The land value of the store is probably mich higher than the Amazon warehouse land.
They sell much more, so all costs can be shared across a million orders, instead of across just 10 books sold.
- They can also afford to just sell at a loss if they want, similar to how Wal-Mart briefly sold games at $50 new instead of $60 as an incentive for people to buy from them instead of competitors.
- it used to be a rule of thumb in business that every time you double in size your costs go down about 20%.
- don't forget taxes evasions
- Biggest cost factor is the people working in a book store per book sold as well as their pay is mich higher for a book store. As an upside you get people who can actually recommend you great books based on your interests. The insane book love and knowledge those people often have is astonishing to me. That's what I very much am fine with paying a bit extra for.
- Also there are times Amazon prints on demand. They don't keep anything in stock taking up space, instead printing it as soon as it's ordered allowing them to save space
  
  Doesn't bookbinding actually take a long time? Atleast, for well bound books it does. Can't speak for the cheap glued on paperbacks.

when I sold to Amazon, they refused to do a deal at anybody else's cost structure. They demand an extra discount, but they also buy two of everything you have and everything you sell. It's a big trade off. Even getting the shipment organized because it's not correct exactly, you can be fined. So I'm sure they make a little bit off of that, plus it is direct company strategy to undercut, so they eliminate competition. They have had no problem losing money while establishing their business structure. Also, their used books are procured by local people for pennies on the dollar and typically make the seller less than a dollar in profit . They are operating on very thin margins, and making their money elsewhere with the expectation of diminished competition.
Yhey also keep some of their overhead low. The retailer that wants to sell tonAmazon has to build their own sku's into the system. It's very tedious work, and takes a very long time, and you have to fill out all of their fields, even though most of them are very repetitive. It's a large undertaking and not having to do it saves them a lot of money.
They also charge book sellers warehouse fees, so they don't have to keep the books around their house waiting to sell. Again, all of these little things add up to pennies on the dollar but when you multiply it out by Amazon numbers it adds up.
They already have the infrastructure in place, having an extra line item doesn't really affect Amazon as much as you think it might.
sometimes a company will do some thing called loss-leaders. Perhaps a new book comes out, and they want to sell it to $15 less than everybody else. They are willing to lose that money to get your business so that you do future business with them. They would like to sign up new accounts which is harder than getting existing accounts to double their spending. either way, engagement and purchases are up when you offer steep discounts.
- They are willing to lose that money to get your business so that you do future business with them.
  ... and then, after they have captured both you and the seller, they enshittify the whole scheme making everyone except their shareholders miserable.
- Interesting. So it sounds like a chunk of the infrastructure cost is actually passed on to third-party sellers (warehouse fees and admin work) rather than Amazon assuming those costs themselves.

Amazon does not make any profit from their books. They are able to sell them cheaply because they sell them at a loss. They weren't even profitable for a long time and maintained thanks to investors. Basically, Bezos sold the idea of the future of his store's worth. And it worked.
- That hasn’t been true for more than a decade. (Why be in a business you can’t make money on?) Amazon have, for a long time, invested more or less all their profits into new business lines on the promise that they could easily “flip a switch” and start making billions in profits. (They started doing that a few years ago after bad financial results.)
  
  Sure, but in that previous time period, they didn't make a profit but were able to destroy the brick and mortar bookstore. So I guess it would be more honest to say they demolished the bookselling industry and now can argue for whatever deals they want because the only other bookstores are weakened.
  
  Are you referring specifically to the book sales or the company as a whole?

At a guess:
Volume discount: Amazon will buy a hell of a lot more books than a single mom and pop store
Retail rule of thirds: (very loosely) a third of the price you it goes to manufacturing, a third to distribution/logistics, and a third to the retailer. Amazon vertically integrates the second two.
Online only: website capacity costs a lot less than running a brick and mortar store
Margin: amazon will make less per book but sells more books because people prefer to buy them cheaper. There’s a separate discussion here about anti competitive practices (eg undercutting competition to put them out of business, then raising prices later) but that is a whole other debate
- I'm not just talking about mom and pop stores though. Even Barnes and Noble is out priced, and, although it wasn't in my initial question, other smaller online-only retailers like thriftbooks and bookshop are also handily undercut by Amazon.
  I'm not implying you're wrong, just that there's probably more to the picture here. I think volume and slim margins probably have a lot to do with it here as Amazon probably makes a handy profit on sales of non-book goods (and let's not forget that their product sales aren't even what makes them money, it's their cloud services) and as another commenter said Amazon passes some of the infrastructure costs on to the sellers.

Not in Germany.
- I want this to be true... is it?

Two things. Commercial real estate required for physical book stores is expensive. Amazon has warehouse space, but so does the bookstore company. Volume discounts. Amazon probably sells double the volume of their next biggest competitors. This allows them to purchase the books for cheaper than their competitors. This also goes for shipping. They make the same kind of arrangement with USPS that allows them to purchase shipping at a discount since they buy so much of it.
There are other reasons, but those are the biggest.

All the solid answers posted plus they're now a massive store - they can live on, say, $0.10 profit on a book because they made plenty more on the backpack and tire patch kit and deodorant you also added to your cart because convenience.
Plus no retail rent, no retail staff to pay.
It's like gas stations barely breaking even on gas, but making bank on snacks. Bookstores usually won't have those other product categories to fall back on like Amazon does.

You should ask at your local brick and mortar store. When The Witcher series came out, I wanted to buy the book set. Buying from the local store guaranteed that I got a matched set at about the same price as ordering off amazon.

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