Amazon is making bold moves to expand its reach beyond its own marketplace, slowly capturing market share by directing shoppers to outside brands to purchase goods. Swaths of customer data and potential fulfillment opportunities lie in Amazon’s hands to take advantage of. 

Rahul Saraswat, Senior VP and Head of eCommerce, Operations, and Logistics at Aventis Systems, sees it as a calculated pivot toward a new kind of dominance. While Amazon has plenty of ways to direct their search expansion, he sees their greatest potential growth in advertising.

Cash cow: "I believe that within the eCommerce space, they’ve identified digital ad dollars as the next cash cow," Saraswat said. "It’s a service-based business, it’s growing, and they already have decades’ worth of consumer data—which they can market to. This is all a strategy to build out their own kind of retail ad business."

Buy with Prime: A key part of this strategy is Amazon’s "Buy with Prime" initiative, which allows brands to offer Prime-like benefits on their own websites. Saraswat sees this as Amazon's way of pulling third-party brands deeper into its orbit—even outside the traditional marketplace.

"I know they’ve been trying to really expand that service—basically Prime—outside of the Amazon ecosystem," he said. "I believe what they’ll do is incentivize brands to sign up with Buy with Prime on their website, and then feature them more prominently. Of course, they’ll charge you, but if you have Buy with Prime, maybe you’ll get better placement or a discount on commissions."

Dabbling with Amazon: Saraswat believes this will be especially appealing for brands that aren’t fully committed to Amazon but still want to remain competitive. "This is more for brands that dabble in Amazon, don’t really offer too much of their catalog there, but want to make sure their products are available," he said. "They want to be at the top of the listings. They need some sort of counter-strategy against competitors on Amazon who may be taking market share."

Amazon first: Yet he warns that Amazon’s motives are always aligned with its own interests. "Anytime a brand enters into a relationship with Amazon, they should understand that Amazon thinks of Amazon first—which, you know, most companies do," Saraswat said. "But Amazon more than anyone. They’ll sell it to you as a great service with all these benefits, but you have to think about what’s in it for them."