If you’re like one of many online shoppers in the U.S., chances are you’ve recently bought something from Amazon. 

The Seattle retail and tech group boasts more than 200 million Prime members, who for a fee enjoy everything from fast and free shipping to savings at Amazon-owned stores, like Whole Foods Market.

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Amazon didn’t invent online shopping, but it was one of the first to adopt and broadly leverage the convenience of it. 

What started in a garage in 1994, with Jeff Bezos intending to sell mostly books, has in just 30 years become the largest U.S. online marketplace. 

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And it’s not even close. Amazon accounts for about 40% of online purchases. For perspective, the second and third e-commerce sites are Walmart, with more than 6% market share, and Apple, with more than 3%. 

It’s also estimated that more than half of online users begin their online-shopping searches on Amazon. All that totals quite a big sum of money for Amazon: Revenue for its most recently completed fiscal year totaled $574.79 billion. 

Amazon is constantly iterating, but cautiously

Surprisingly, though, the vast majority of Amazon’s profit comes not from its mammoth online marketplace but from its cloud-computing service, Amazon Web Services. About 70% of its net revenue is derived from the service, which works with clients like Sony and the U.S. government.

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To that end, Amazon is always trying to tweak its online marketplace in an effort to add more members and make e-commerce more profitable. 

But big changes that customers notice right away are a risky game, so Amazon prefers to make smaller tweaks over time and test out new products before committing to an overhaul.

Amazon adds a new stream to search function

One such change is a new way to search in the Amazon Marketplace. 

Since so many online shoppers begin their searches on Amazon — so much so that the e-commerce giant has been stealing search-market share from Alphabet’s Google itself — Amazon is on a quest to make itself more than just a shopping giant. It wants to be a search giant, too.

So Amazon will begin including products that customers are searching for that aren’t sold exclusively by Amazon. 

For example, if you were to search for a pair of sneakers and Amazon didn’t sell them, it might give you a link to an external site where those shoes are available for purchase. 

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Amazon will make this clear. It will alert customers that they’re clicking a link that will take them away from Amazon. It has said it won’t share personal data or information with other websites via the new tool.

“This experience makes it easier for customers to quickly and easily find products from you [the brand] that are not sold in Amazon’s store when they search in the Amazon Shopping app,” Amazon explains. “While the best customer experience is products sold directly on Amazon, this program provides another way for customers to discover your products and brand.”

The change will happen gradually, and not every customer will see it immediately, as Amazon experiments with the rollout.

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