Amazon touts small-business success on its platforms

The conventional wisdom once said Amazon is the bane of small business, using its might and scale to undercut the mom-and-pop retailer on price and convenience.The reality is something different, Amazon argues in its second annual report on its impact on businesses with fewer than 1,000 employees and less than $1 billion in revenue. In the U.S., more than 1.9 million such firms, as well as authors and developers, worked with the commerce giant in 2018. In 2017, it said it had 1 million third-party sellers, but did not provide a comparable number to the broader group counted in 2018.Small and medium firms selling through its online marketplace had an estimated 1.6 million employees worldwide in 2018, up from 900,000 in 2017.