Amazon Says SMEs Account for Half of Its Sales

Amazon says that small businesses and entrepreneurs had a record-breaking season with more than one billion items ordered worldwide. Over just five days, from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday, nearly 140 million items were ordered from small businesses and entrepreneurs.  Reports say that a big driver of this trend is Fulfillment by Amazon, the program that lets small businesses offer Prime two-day shipping by preshipping their items to Amazon fulfillment centers, and letting the company handle packaging, shipping and customer service.

CNBC and SurveyMonkey polled small businesses on the e-commerce giant last quarter and found about one-third think Amazon is good for business, nearly half say Amazon is bad for business, but less than 10 percent said they actually compete with Amazon for customers.