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Amazon Lent $1 Billion To Merchants To Boost Sales On Its Marketplace (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon.com Inc has stepped up lending to third-party sellers on its site who are looking to grow their business, a company executive said in an interview on Wednesday. The e-commerce giant has doled out more than $1 billion in small loans to sellers in the past 12 months, compared with more than $1.5 billion it lent from 2011 through 2015, said Peeyush Nahar, vice president for Amazon Marketplace. Sellers have used the money to expand their inventory or discount items on Amazon, he said. Boosting sales for third-party merchants is lucrative for Amazon, which takes a cut of transactions on its site. It also has made a business out of handling more leg work for sellers, too. They pay Amazon to fulfill their orders and boost their placement in search results, without which sellers might struggle to grab shoppers' attention. More than 20,000 small businesses have received a loan from Amazon and more than half of those have taken a second loan from the company, it said.
It has never meant that. As for your second sentence, you do know that is quite common, right? Every hear of auto financing? Or gas credit cards? Or the fact that damn near every business gave credit to customers before Visa and Mastercard, etc became popular? Company store has a specific meaning - that an employee of a company has virtually NO CHOICE but to spend his income only on products offered BY HIS EMPLOYER. That is not even remotely the case here.