Major ClientsWide moat

Amazon (AMZN) — moat facet

Amazon has arranged to be paid by every party in its own ecosystem: the shopper pays a membership, the seller pays a commission, and then the same seller pays again to be seen.

Amazon has no major clients in the sense that a supplier has them, and four enormous customer groups that behave completely differently from one another.

Who paid Amazon in 2025, by product line ($B)Shoppers (online + physical)$291.9BThird-party sellers$172.2BAWS customers$128.7BAdvertisers$68.6BSubscribers$49.6BAmazon Form 10-K FY2025, net sales by product line (other $5.9B omitted)
Shoppers are the largest payer, but sellers, advertisers and subscribers together paid $290B, nearly as much.

The consumers are the classic no-concentration base: hundreds of millions of shoppers, around 200 million of whom pay an annual fee for Prime1 — a customer relationship where the customer pays for the privilege of being one, which is close to unique in retail. The sellers are the opposite kind of relationship entirely: independent merchants supply roughly 60% of units sold2 and pay something like half of each sale back to Amazon in referral, fulfilment and advertising fees3. They are simultaneously Amazon's suppliers, its customers and its competitors on its own shelves.

AWS is where Amazon has contracts rather than transactions — a backlog of $496 billion at the end of June 2026, concentrated in large enterprises and, increasingly, in two AI laboratories: OpenAI, which expanded its commitment by $100 billion over eight years, and Anthropic, which expanded its own by more than $100 billion over ten45. And the advertisers, now supplying $76 billion over the twelve months to June 20266, are mostly the sellers again, paying a second time.

The unifying observation is that Amazon has arranged to be paid by every party in its own ecosystem: the shopper pays a membership, the seller pays a commission, the same seller pays again for visibility, and the enterprise pays for the computing underneath all of it. The pages that follow take those four in turn.

Moat trajectory: Holding steady

Four customer groups with genuinely different properties, and the balance among them has not shifted much: consumers remain atomised and paying, sellers remain dependent and paying more, AWS keeps signing contracts, and advertisers keep bidding. The structure is unusually robust precisely because no single group can renegotiate on its own.

The number that tests this moat
Moat Explorer calc
Revenue collected from sellers, advertisers and members
40.5% of 2025 revenue ($290.4B)

Amazon is paid by every party in its ecosystem, not just by shoppers. The share rising means more of the business is fees rather than retail margin; a falling share would mean sellers or advertisers are pulling back.

How it's calculated: Third-party seller services ($172,162M) + advertising services ($68,635M) + subscription services ($49,619M), divided by net sales ($716,924M).
Source: Amazon Form 10-K, FY2025 ↗
Dig deeper
DIG DEEPER 01
Prime: The Customer Who Pays to Be a Customer
Two hundred million people pay an annual fee for the right to shop somewhere — which inverts the normal relationship between retailer and customer.
DIG DEEPER 02
The Sellers Who Pay Roughly Half
Supplier, paying customer and competitor on the same product page — and because the traffic belongs to Amazon, the take rate has proved raisable.
DIG DEEPER 03
AWS: Where the Contracts Live
A ten-year commitment from a bank is money; the same commitment from a lab whose revenues trail its obligations is a forecast with a signature on it.
DIG DEEPER 04
The Advertisers Are the Sellers Again
A toll on top of a toll, levied on merchants who can't decline it — an organic listing nobody sees is not a viable alternative.
References
  1. Third-party estimateThe consumers are the classic no-concentration base: hundreds of millions of shoppers, around 200 million of whom pay an annual fee for Prime — a customer relationship where the customer pays for the privilege of being one, which is close to unique in retail.
    Amazon Prime — program disclosures (200M+ members management-disclosed; fee history $99 -> $119 -> $139; the benefits bundle as documented) — Current program · publ. 2018-2026 · source ↗
  2. ReportedThe sellers are the opposite kind of relationship entirely: independent merchants supply roughly 60% of units sold and pay something like half of each sale back to Amazon in referral, fulfilment and advertising fees.
    Amazon disclosure — third-party sellers account for ~60%+ of units sold (millions of active sellers) — Company-disclosed, ongoing · publ. 2023-2026 · source ↗
  3. Third-party estimateThe sellers are the opposite kind of relationship entirely: independent merchants supply roughly 60% of units sold and pay something like half of each sale back to Amazon in referral, fulfilment and advertising fees.
    Marketplace Pulse / ILSR analyses — cumulative seller take (referral + FBA + advertising) approaching ~50% of a typical seller's revenue — Recent analyses · publ. 2023-2026 · source ↗
  4. ReportedAWS is where Amazon has contracts rather than transactions — a backlog of $496 billion at the end of June 2026, concentrated in large enterprises and, increasingly, in two AI laboratories: OpenAI, which expanded its commitment by $100 billion over eight years, and Anthropic, which expanded its own by more than $100 billion over ten.
    Amazon.com Inc., Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2026 — purchases of property and equipment $54,208M in Q2 2026; remaining performance obligations of approximately $496 billion (weighted-average remaining life 6.4 years), after OpenAI expanded its existing $38.0 billion commitment by $100.0 billion over 8.0 years in Q1 2026 and Anthropic expanded its commitment by more than $100.0 billion over 10.0 years in Q2 2026; upward adjustments to private equity investments of $50.5 billion in Q2 2026 and $62.8 billion in the six months, primarily nonvoting preferred stock in Anthropic; about $640 million of IEEPA tariff refunds recorded mainly as a reduction to cost of sales; shipping costs $27.9 billion against $23.4 billion — Q2 2026 — quarter ended June 30, 2026 · publ. July 2026 · source ↗
  5. ReportedAWS is where Amazon has contracts rather than transactions — a backlog of $496 billion at the end of June 2026, concentrated in large enterprises and, increasingly, in two AI laboratories: OpenAI, which expanded its commitment by $100 billion over eight years, and Anthropic, which expanded its own by more than $100 billion over ten.
    Anthropic — expanded Amazon collaboration (Apr 20, 2026): up to $25B total investment ($5B immediate + $20B milestone-linked; ~$13B cumulative prior), >$100B of AWS commitments over the next decade, up to 5GW of new Trainium capacity — Announced Apr 20, 2026 · publ. Apr 20, 2026 · source ↗
  6. Moat Explorer calcAnd the advertisers, now supplying $76 billion over the twelve months to June 2026, are mostly the sellers again, paying a second time.
    Moat Explorer calculation from Amazon's Form 10-K segment and product-line tables (FY2022-FY2025) and the quarterly results releases: AWS share of operating income = AWS operating income / consolidated operating income ($45,606M / $79,975M = 57.0% in 2025; ($14,161M + $16,621M) / ($23,852M + $27,461M) = 60.0% in H1 2026; $16,621M / $27,461M = 60.5% in Q2 2026; $54,681M / $93,712M = 58.3% TTM); AWS share of net sales $128,725M / $716,924M = 18.0%; retail segments' operating income $29,619M + $4,750M = $34,369M on $588,199M = 5.8%; 2022 segment operating income North America -$2,847M, International -$7,746M, AWS $22,841M against a consolidated $12,248M; North America operating margin -$2,847M / $315,880M = -0.9% in 2022; advertising TTM to June 2026 $17,703M + $21,317M + $17,243M + $19,809M = $76,072M — FY2022-Q2 2026 · publ. 2026 · source ↗
    Method: Moat Explorer calculation from Amazon's filed segment, product-line and supplemental tables; see the source line for each operand.
Sources
Generated September 22, 2026