Doesn Amazon lose money on every sale it makes?
No. For instance, some of the things Amazon sells are expensive hardback books at full retail price. If you bought a few of those, it’s likely that Amazon would make a decent profit on the deal. So Amazon doesn’t lose money on every sale. On the other hand, some Amazon items, such as bestselling books at 40% or 50% off, are priced very close to what Amazon pays. Moderately-frequent promotions aside, Amazon does not sell books for less than they paid for the book itself. In that sense, it doesn’t usually sell books for below cost. A more subtle debate is whether this is still true if you add the costs of warehouse workers, warehouse space, and other things that must be scaled up with increasing sales. That debate is unsettled.
