Amazon News
Amazon Business
The Amazon Business marketplace is growing!
Amazon announced a major milestone this week. 3rd party seller products are now available to more than one million business buyers including hospitals, universities, daycares, government agencies, restaurants, Fortune 50 companies and sole proprietors in the USA

It also announced that sellers are offering a Business Price on millions of products making them more discoverable and appealing. This feature can be added in the "Business Price" column of the Manage Inventory dashboard.

Selling Feature Updates
Amazon Business Metrics Dashboard
Sellers now have a Seller Central dashboard to see their Amazon Business badge status, track their B2B performance and stay up to date on Amazon’s badging requirements.

If seller performance dips below Amazon’s standards, they undertake to email sellers within the next 2 months with actions sellers can take to improve their badge status
B2B Central (on mobile)
Amazon has just launched B2B Central in the Seller App to clearly show sellers all things B2B including interactive analytics and B2B-specific recommendations.

The desktop version is currently in development and expected to launch this year.

Amazon 3rd party sellers can download the Seller app from the Google store or Apple store.
Amazon Tax Exemption Program (ATEP)
All Amazon B2B sellers are now enrolled in ATEP (unless they opted out) to ensure Amazon’s tax-exempt buyers aren't charged tax.

Historically, when tax-exempt buyers purchase from sellers not in ATEP they are charged tax and need to contact the seller or Amazon customer service to get a tax refund. This enrollment now reduces post-purchase friction for both buyers and sellers. Sellers do have the ability to opt out of the program if they choose to do so.

Learn more about ATEP
Global Business News
50% of the planet now online
Over 50% of the population of the planet is now on the web.

This has taken about 25 years from the beginning of Western adoption. For comparison, It took until 2007 for over 50% of the global population to live in cities, a process that took around 5,000 years.

Some 726M people have come online in the past 3 years. China is still growing fast, but much of the increase has come from low-income areas in India and Africa.

Like its initial adopters, the newer internet users use pro, messenger apps and entertainment, such as social media and video sharing.

Youtube is increasingly dominated by non-Western users.
Over 1.5 bn FaceBook users are in developing countries

There have been 10s of billions of dollars invested in internet start-ups in the Developing world by venture capitalists.
Walmart in 2018 acquired Flipkart - an Indian e-commerce giant - for $16 Bn.
Keeping it in proportion - financial value
However, there is some reason for caution in assessing the true business value of new users.
Each FaceBook user in Asia generates only $11 ad revenue per year, compared to $112 a year for American users.

The combined revenue of all internet firms in emerging markets, excluding China, is around $100bn a year. This is about the same as Comcast, America’s 31st biggest company by revenue.
Business models
One way these companies are monetising is to grow fast. Many offer to bundle services to maximise income per user - instead of offering separate services like Western firms (for examples, Youtube’s video service or Paypal’s payment service).

Go-Jek in Indonesia, for example, offers ride-hailing, payments,