Amazon Sees Third Quarter Sales Increases of 29 Percent – in Part Due to New Biz Opportunities

Amazon’s (NASDAQ:AMZN) third quarter results are out.

This quarter, the company posted $32.7 billion in revenue in the third quarter, up 29 percent.

Q3 2016 Amazon Results

Key Highlights

Among highlights shared by the online retail giant, some are especially significant for small businesses. These include:

• Since its launch in May 2106, Amazon customers have streamed billions of minutes of content from providers that self-published through Amazon Video Direct.
• Handmade at Amazon has been launched in the U.K, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain. Customers across Europe can now shop from more than 30,000 handcrafted items sold by thousands of artisans from over 40 countries, the retail giant says.
• AmazonFresh has expanded to northern Virginia, Dallas, Maryland, and Chicago. In addition, customers in all locations can now shop for groceries through AmazonFresh directly on the Amazon.com website alongside their other shopping.

Amazon’s Alexa Strikes a Chord with Users

Meanwhile Amazon continues to add more skills to its virtual assistant, Alexa.

In the last three months, Alexa skills selection has increased three-fold. There are now more than 3,000 skills available, including Yahoo Sports Fantasy Football, GE Appliances and more. Many of these skills are useful for small businesses as well.

The company has revealed it has “tens of thousands of developers building new skills for Alexa.”

“Alexa may be Amazon’s most loved invention yet — literally — with over 250,000 marriage proposals from customers and counting,” said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon in the company’s official release. “And she’s just getting better. Because Alexa’s brain is in the cloud, we can easily and continuously add to her capabilities and make her more useful — wait until you see some of the surprises the team is working on now.”

Amazon Photo via Shutterstock

This article, "Amazon Sees Third Quarter Sales Increases of 29 Percent – in Part Due to New Biz Opportunities" was first published on Small Business Trends