By Björn Jeffery, SvD Tech Brief. Published in Svenska Dagbladet on 2 May 2025.
Amazon beat market expectations, but the only word anyone wanted to talk about was “tariffs.” E-commerce has become high politics — and millions of small businesses are now being squeezed between Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump.
Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos may have thought he would be able to live a somewhat quieter life after stepping down as CEO of his mega-company. The multi-billionaire found himself a new fiancée and recently launched her and a number of other celebrities into space on a rocket from his own space company, Blue Origin.
You know — the sort of things billionaires entertain themselves with.
Things have not been particularly quiet, however. Trump’s trade tariffs have placed the otherwise neutral and politically innocuous world of e-commerce squarely in the spotlight. When it was reported that Amazon was planning to display for customers exactly how much of a product’s price consisted of tariffs, a minor political crisis erupted. And Donald Trump did not call Amazon’s CEO Andy Jassy — he called Bezos directly. Shortly afterwards came a very brief message — just 31 words — from Amazon explaining that the company had never approved this change.
When Amazon gathered its analyst community late on Thursday evening, Swedish time, the intention was to keep the focus on the first quarter of the year. Trump’s “Liberation Day,” when the tariffs were introduced, was 2 April — two days after that quarter ended. But in a turbulent global environment, the sales figures from earlier in the year felt distant. The company was expected to report its lowest revenue growth since 2022 — and that was even before the tariffs had been introduced.
Under normal circumstances, Amazon would have delivered a solid quarterly report. Both revenue and profit came in above analyst expectations. CEO Andy Jassy said he was “optimistic” that the company could emerge from the tariff crisis stronger than before it. But what else would he say? CFO Brian Olsavsky did, however, acknowledge that the situation was creating uncertainty.
And that was what the market saw too. The share fell around 3 percent in after-hours trading, and is down a total of around 13 percent since the start of the year.
The tariffs pose a unique challenge for Amazon. For even if the company were to try to shift towards more American suppliers, a large portion of the goods on its platform are not ones it controls itself. Around a quarter of Amazon’s revenues — and over 60 percent of the number of items — come from other traders who use Amazon’s platform purely as a sales channel. To the customer it looks essentially identical — they shop on the website and receive packages. But it is a separate company doing the selling, and it pays fees to Amazon for the privilege.
These businesses range from private individuals to multimillion-dollar companies built up using Amazon’s infrastructure. In total there are around two million different businesses actively selling on the platform, of which roughly 1.1 million are based in the United States alone. Collectively they are large, but they do not act as a unified group and therefore lack negotiating power. Finding new suppliers to circumvent tariffs is therefore an extraordinarily difficult and time-consuming task given the scale of the problem — especially since many of these sellers do not do this full-time, but run their Amazon operation as a side business.
The prospect of millions of sellers all replacing Chinese and other Asian suppliers with American alternatives is therefore a near-impossible task — at least in the near term. Especially since up to 70 percent of all goods on Amazon come from China. The risk is therefore more that sellers choose to close their businesses entirely. That would hurt Amazon’s revenues significantly — but it would above all affect individual American entrepreneurs whose livelihoods could be destroyed.
The so-called “adjustment” brought about by the tariffs — as the American government has described it — is something Amazon will be able to manage. It is one of the world’s largest companies with a broad portfolio of revenue streams, much of which has nothing to do with e-commerce at all. It is, for example, one of the world’s largest providers of cloud services. But the individual sellers on its platform are not necessarily as resilient. If the tariffs cause them to scale back — or shut down — it could be a severe blow both to Amazon and to American commerce as a whole.
