How Does Amazon Make Money? Business Segments Explained

A company can take most of its money through one door and make most of its profit through another. A shop that sells goods on thin margins, standing beside a service business that sells capacity on fat ones, shows that pattern every year. The revenue map and the profit map of such a company look nothing alike. A reader who has seen only one of them will misjudge what the shares are worth.

An annual report cuts a business in two ways to show this. The first cut is into segments: the units whose profit the management reviews, which for a retailer that also rents out computing are usually the retail business by region and the computing on its own. The second cut is into revenue lines: the kinds of thing customers pay for, such as goods, seller fees, advertising or subscriptions. A segment can contain several lines and a line can be spread over several segments, so the two tables answer different questions.

Amazon reports three segments and seven revenue lines, and the profit is concentrated in the smallest segment by sales. Read side by side, the two tables explain how one share price can hold a thin-margin shop and a fat-margin utility at the same time.

On BloFin that share is held as the AMZNX/USDT Spot token or as the AMZNUSDT Perpetual, and both carry the three segments in the proportions the filings report, because neither instrument can hold one segment without the others.

What are Amazon's three business segments?

Amazon reports three segments: North America, International and Amazon Web Services (AWS). North America and International are the retail business split by geography, and each includes the advertising and subscription revenue earned through its stores. In 2025 they had net sales of $426.3 billion and $161.9 billion, and AWS, the cloud business, had $128.7 billion (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K).

The definitions are narrower than the names suggest. The North America segment "primarily consists of amounts earned from retail sales of consumer products (including from sellers) and advertising and subscription services through North America-focused online and physical stores", and it includes export sales from those online stores (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K). The International segment is the same set of activities through internationally focused online stores. It includes their export sales, even to customers in the United States, Mexico and Canada (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K). AWS "consists of amounts earned from global sales of compute, storage, database, and other services for start-ups, enterprises, government agencies, and academic institutions", and there are no revenue transactions between the segments (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K).

The segments are the units the chief executive reviews, so they are where profit is reported, as operating income: what is left of a segment's sales after the costs of running it, before interest and tax. Operating expenses for fulfillment, technology and infrastructure, sales and marketing, and general and administrative work are allocated to the segment in which they are incurred. The majority of infrastructure costs go to AWS based on usage (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K). That allocation matters, because the AWS profit figure already carries the data centers, while the retail figures carry the warehouses and the delivery network. Which of these segment lines moves the share on a results day, and by how much, is ranked in what moves Amazon's stock price.

Amazon revenue breakdown: Share of sales against share of profit

AWS produced 18.0% of Amazon's 2025 net sales and 57.0% of its operating income (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K). North America produced 59.5% of sales and 37.0% of operating income, and International 22.6% of sales and 5.9% of operating income. The segment operating incomes were $29.6 billion, $4.8 billion and $45.6 billion against a consolidated $80.0 billion (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K).

The 2025 columns are the segment note's figures and their ratios (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K). In the second quarter of 2026 AWS's share of sales rose to 21.1% and its share of operating income to 60.5%. Its sales grew 37% in a year while the retail segments grew 15% to 16% (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q).

The one-line version, that retail is the revenue and the cloud is the profit, is true and incomplete. The two retail segments together earned $34.4 billion of operating income in 2025 on $588.2 billion of sales. That $34.4 billion is more than AWS earned in 2023, when its operating income was $24.6 billion (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K). Retail is a low-margin business of a size that produces a large profit anyway, and its margin has been rising: North America went from 4.2% in 2023 to 6.9% in 2025. The quarterly release carries these figures beside the company's own guidance range, and how Amazon earnings reports work starts from that comparison of the two.

When the next quarterly release lands after the Nasdaq close, those three segment lines are what the AMZNX/USDT Spot pair reprices on overnight, and the pair's live price and order book are on its page.

The seven revenue lines and what each one counts

The second cut of the business is into seven revenue lines that run across the segments: online stores, physical stores, third-party seller services, advertising, subscriptions, AWS and other. In 2025 online stores were the largest at $269.3 billion, third-party seller services second at $172.2 billion, and AWS third at $128.7 billion (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K). Advertising was 9.6% of 2025 sales (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K). It was also the fastest-growing line after AWS in the second quarter of 2026, up 26% (source: Amazon Q2 2026 results release).

The 2025 figures are from the annual report, and the second-quarter figures, growth rates and definitions are from the results release (source: Amazon Q2 2026 results release).

The line that most often misleads is the second largest. Say a seller sells a $50 item through Amazon's marketplace and pays Amazon a commission and a fulfillment fee that come to $15. Amazon records the $15 as third-party seller services revenue and nothing of the $50. The company states that it is "not the seller of record in these transactions" and earns "fixed fees, a percentage of sales, per-unit activity fees, interest, or some combination thereof" (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K). When Amazon sells the same item itself, the whole $50 goes into online stores. The $172.2 billion is therefore fee income on a much larger volume of goods that the company does not report. Third-party sellers supplied 61% of the paid units in Amazon's stores in the second quarter of 2026 (source: Amazon Q2 2026 results release).

What each segment keeps of a dollar of sales

Say you take $100 of sales in each segment for 2025. North America kept $6.90 as operating income, International kept $2.90, and AWS kept $35.40, with the consolidated business keeping $11.20 (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K). Those are the segment margins, and they are how a fifth of the sales becomes more than half of the profit.

The quarterly figures move the same way. In the second quarter of 2026 North America kept $7.90 of each $100, International $4.10 and AWS $39.40 (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q). The AWS figure includes one non-cash item. Technology and infrastructure expense that quarter carried a net unrealized gain of $0.6 billion on long-dated energy contracts, a revaluation that moves operating income without moving cash, and the company says it primarily fell in AWS, so the underlying margin is a little lower than 39.4% (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q). The buildings and servers behind that margin are the largest capital budget in the company. Their cost reaches the AWS figure as depreciation, the servers over five to six years, the mechanism followed in Amazon's AI capex and cash flow.

The retail margins are thin because the retail segments carry the warehouses, the delivery network and the shipping bill. The annual report gives the direction of change rather than a formula. It attributes the 2025 rise in North America operating income primarily to "increased unit sales and increased advertising sales, partially offset by increased fulfillment, technology and infrastructure, shipping, and other operating costs" (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K). The levers behind that sentence are what Amazon's profit margins explained works through, starting from those two figures.

Where advertising and Prime sit: Inside the retail segments

Advertising and subscriptions are revenue lines rather than segments, so their profit is never reported on its own. Advertising services brought in $68.6 billion in 2025 and subscription services $49.6 billion, and both sit inside the North America and International operating income figures (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K).

Together the two lines were $118.3 billion in 2025, or 16.5% of net sales, and advertising is one of the two reasons the annual report gives for the retail operating income rising. The annual report names increased advertising sales as a primary driver of the operating-income increase in both retail segments (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K). The company does not say what advertising earns after its costs, and it reports no operating income for any revenue line. The retail margins of 6.9% and 2.9% are the blended result of goods, fees, advertisements and subscriptions in one figure.

A reader who wants the advertising line on its own has to work with what the company discloses: the revenue, its growth rate, and the segment it lands in. In the second quarter of 2026 advertising, at $19.8 billion, was larger than subscriptions and physical stores combined (source: Amazon Q2 2026 results release). Advertising grew from 8.2% of net sales in 2023 to 9.6% in 2025 (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K). Where those advertisements run, from Prime Video and Fire TV to the search results in the store, is set out in Amazon's advertising business and the stock. Prime membership fees are the first item in the subscription line's definition, and what a member costs and earns is the arithmetic of Amazon Prime economics and the stock.

The International segment: From three years of losses to profit

The International segment lost money in 2021, 2022 and 2023 and has been profitable since. Its operating result went from a $0.7 billion profit in 2020 to losses of $0.9 billion, $7.7 billion and $2.7 billion, then to profits of $3.8 billion in 2024 and $4.8 billion in 2025 (source: Amazon 2022 Form 10-K).

The 2020 to 2022 rows are from the 2022 annual report, the 2023 to 2025 rows from the 2025 annual report, and the margins are the ratios (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K).

Sales fell in 2022 while the loss widened, which is the shape of a currency move and a cost build arriving together. The turn since then has two causes the company names and one that is a currency effect. The annual report attributes the 2025 increase in International operating income primarily to "increased unit sales and increased advertising sales, partially offset by increased fulfillment and shipping costs" (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K). It also states that changes in foreign exchange rates positively impacted that operating income by $0.9 billion in 2025 (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K). Nearly a fifth of the segment's 2025 profit was therefore exchange rates. In the second quarter of 2026 the segment earned $1.7 billion on $42.2 billion of sales, a 4.1% margin, against 4.1% a year earlier and 2.1% in the holiday quarter between (source: Amazon Q2 2026 results release).

Physical stores, healthcare and the other line

Physical stores were $22.6 billion of net sales in 2025 (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K). In the second quarter of 2026 they were $5.8 billion, up 4% on a year earlier, the slowest of the seven lines (source: Amazon Q2 2026 results release). Healthcare has no line of its own and sits inside the other line.

Open the results release and the physical line is the walk-in trade and little else. An order placed online and collected from a store, or delivered from it, is counted as online, so the line measures goods a customer physically selects (source: Amazon Q2 2026 results release). The company excludes Whole Foods Market from its paid-unit metrics, so the unit growth it reports each quarter is a measure of the online business (source: Amazon Q2 2026 results release). Set against a retailer whose whole business is physical stores, the line is small. That comparison, store by store and margin by margin, is made in Amazon and Walmart compared as stocks.

Healthcare enters the accounts in two places. Amazon acquired One Medical on February 22, 2023 for about $3.5 billion, net of cash acquired, to offer customers healthcare, and allocated its goodwill to the North America segment (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K). The revenue from healthcare services sits in the other line, alongside shipping services sold to third parties, some licensing and distribution of video content, and the co-branded credit card agreements (source: Amazon Q2 2026 results release). At $5.9 billion the whole line was 0.8% of 2025 sales. The healthcare business, whatever its size inside it, is below the threshold at which the company reports a line.

What a holder of AMZNX or the AMZNUSDT Perpetual owns

A holder of AMZNX owns a claim on one share of Amazon.com, Inc. held in custody, and that share carries all three segments and all seven lines in the proportions the filings report. BloFin lists no instrument for AWS alone, and whether one could ever exist is the question can you buy AWS stock answers.

Say you hold 100 AMZNX through a results day. The company's segment table is your table: when AWS grows 37% and the retail segments grow 15% to 16%, you hold all three rates at once, in the filed proportions, and no order on either instrument can weight one segment over another. The token tracks that price one-for-one and carries no dividend, so the only thing you receive from that profit is the price at which the market values it. The mechanism of the backing, share for token, is set out in what tokenized Amazon (AMZNX) is. The AMZNX/USDT pair traded at 255.79 USDT at 06:00 UTC on September 21, 2026. At that price a 1% move in the share is about 2.56 USDT on each token, and on 100 tokens about 256 USDT, whichever segment caused it.

A holder of the AMZNUSDT Perpetual has the same exposure through a contract rather than a share. The contract adds leverage and a funding payment between long and short positions every eight hours, and it carries no claim on the company at all. Neither instrument lets a holder choose a segment, and neither dilutes one. Whoever holds either holds all three margins from the segment table, in one price. Both instruments track one Nasdaq-listed share, and what Amazon stock is starts from that share.

Looking to gain exposure to Amazon? To get started, you'll need to first create a BloFin account, fund your account with cryptocurrency, and navigate to the AMZNX/USDT Spot trading page or AMZNUSDT Perpetual page.

Frequently asked questions

What is Amazon's main source of profit?

AWS. The cloud segment produced $45.6 billion of Amazon's $80.0 billion of operating income in 2025, 57.0% of the total from 18.0% of the sales, and in the second quarter of 2026 its share of operating income rose to 60.5% (source: Amazon Q2 2026 Form 10-Q). The two retail segments together still earned $34.4 billion in 2025, so retail is a real profit source, only a far thinner one: North America kept 6.9% of its sales and International 2.9%, against 35.4% at AWS.

What share of Amazon's sales comes from outside the United States?

About a third. Net sales attributed to the United States were $489.7 billion in 2025, 68.3% of the $716.9 billion total, leaving $227.3 billion from other countries (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K). Germany was the largest of those at $45.9 billion, followed by the United Kingdom at $43.2 billion and Japan at $30.7 billion, with the rest of the world at $107.5 billion (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K). Sales are attributed to countries by the country the store is focused on, so the geographic table and the International segment measure slightly different things.

How does Amazon decide whether a sale is North America or International?

By the store, not the customer. A sale through a North America-focused store is North America even when the goods are exported. A sale through an internationally focused store is International even when the customer is in the United States, Mexico or Canada (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K). AWS is a segment of its own, so a cloud customer in Germany is counted in AWS and never in International. There are no sales between the segments, so the three add up to the consolidated figure without adjustment.

How much does Amazon make off each sale?

It depends on who is selling. When Amazon sells an item itself, the full price is revenue in online stores and the profit is whatever remains after the cost of the goods, fulfillment and shipping. When an independent seller sells the item, only Amazon's commission and fees are revenue, so the company's margins are earned on the fee and never on the price of the goods (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K). The company publishes no marketplace sales volume and no profit by line, so a per-sale profit figure does not exist in the filings.

Does Amazon report Prime Video, Alexa or its devices as separate businesses?

Prime Video and the other digital subscriptions sit inside subscription services together with Prime membership fees, with no line of their own. Video sold or rented on its own sits in online stores as digital media (source: Amazon Q2 2026 results release). Devices such as Kindle, Fire TV, Echo and Ring are products Amazon sells itself, so their sales sit inside online and physical stores with everything else the company sells, and Alexa has no revenue line at all. Video advertising, wherever it is shown, is in advertising services (source: Amazon Q2 2026 results release).

Is AWS a separate company?

AWS is a segment of Amazon.com, Inc., reported in its accounts and owned entirely by it, with no shares of its own on any exchange. Its 2025 net sales of $128.7 billion and operating income of $45.6 billion are consolidated into Amazon's results (source: Amazon 2025 Form 10-K). A holder of Amazon stock, of AMZNX or of the AMZNUSDT Perpetual therefore holds AWS only through the parent, and the routes people search for, from a spin-off to an AWS token, are examined in the page on whether you can buy AWS stock.

Researched and written by the BloFin Academy editorial team with AI-assisted drafting. All facts independently verified. Primary sources include Amazon's 2025 and 2022 Forms 10-K, its second-quarter 2026 Form 10-Q and results release filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and BloFin's AMZNX/USDT and AMZNUSDT pages, with the venue price read on September 21, 2026.

Nothing in this article constitutes financial advice, and nothing in it predicts Amazon's future sales, profit or share price or recommends buying, selling or holding Amazon in any form. Segment figures are the company's own allocation of shared costs and can be restated; a segment's share of profit in one year is no guide to the next, and the International segment has swung between loss and profit within three years. AMZNX tracks the share's price and carries the issuer's and custodians' risk in addition, and a leveraged position in AMZNUSDT can be liquidated by a single session's move. Past performance does not indicate future results. Do your own research and consider your risk tolerance before you trade on BloFin.