At Amazon, supporting small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) is a fundamental part of our work and an extension of our customer-centric culture. We see value in investing in the success of sellers, artisans, authors, package-delivery and logistics services, and software developers. When they thrive, our customers benefit from the products and services they offer. That’s part of the reason that between 2019 and 2020, Amazon will have invested more than $30 billion in logistics, tools, services, programs, and people to foster the growth of our SMB sellers.

COVID-19 has changed the way we live and work and has created daunting challenges for small businesses around the world. Customers have changed buying habits, and many companies have had to curtail their operations or even close.

Yet smaller companies have continued to grow with Amazon, despite the crisis.

Read the report.

Since the pandemic hit, third-party sellers have had record sales. Their products continue to account for more than 50% of all units sold in our online stores, and their sales continue to outpace our first-party sales. During the 12 months ending May 31, American SMBs sold more than 3.4 billion products in our stores, and averaged 6,500 products sold per minute.

And it’s not just SMBs selling in Amazon's stores that are thriving. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is helping hundreds of thousands of SMBs, startups, and partners launch and scale their businesses. There are more than 700,000 developers building skills for Alexa. These technology entrepreneurs are creating enormous economic value, and delighting customers with their innovations. Last-mile and middle-mile delivery businesses in the U.S. employ more than 95,000 drivers. And in the last 12 months, authors earned almost $320 million from the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) Select Global Fund.

In the U.S., Amazon works with more than 2 million independent sellers, authors, content creators, developers, delivery businesses and IT solution providers. We help them reach more customers, grow their business, pursue their entrepreneurial ambitions, and create jobs. SMBs selling in our U.S. store have created an estimated 1.1 million jobs.

I’ve always admired our small business partners' entrepreneurial spirit and drive to innovate. Recently, I’ve been inspired by their ability to adapt and deliver urgently needed products to our most vulnerable customers.

This SMB Impact Report demonstrates and celebrates the success of those entrepreneurs. While no one has a perfect playbook for how to respond to COVID-19, our commitment to supporting them has never been more steadfast. We at Amazon want to congratulate and thank the millions of SMBs whose work is represented here.