Amazon corporate employees have been pushing back against the company’s return to office policy for months—and it seems the e-commerce giant’s CEO has had enough.
Amazon has restarted a shipping service it paused in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Amazon Shipping allows sellers to ship Amazon orders or products sold on other sites.
The company said in a blog post Monday that it will use artificial intelligence to pick out common themes in reviews and summarize them in a short paragraph on the product detail page.
Amazon’s flagship online retail business, which had slowed dramatically following a boom earlier in the pandemic, grew 5%, its best showing since the third quarter of last year.
Amazon said the first day of the sale was the biggest in its history and that shoppers purchased more than 375 million items over two days.
Amazon was sued Wednesday by Federal Trade Commission, which accused the company of using deceptive designs, known as “dark patterns,” to deceive consumers into enrolling in the Prime program.
The Federal Trade Commission voted to file charges in two separate cases Wednesday that could also force the company to delete certain data collected by its popular internet-connected devices.
Amazon.com is rivaling efforts by Microsoft and Google to weave generative artificial intelligence into their search engines.
Amazon first announced its plans for its second headquarters in fall 2018, but the pandemic has thrown them into disarray as white-collar workers traded their commutes for their living rooms.
The company has already hired more than 8,000 employees in the Arlington, Virginia, area and will welcome them to Met Park campus, the first phase of development, when it opens this June.
Anti-monopoly groups have been calling on the Federal Trade Commission to block Amazon’s purchase of the company, arguing it would endanger patient privacy and give the online retailer more dominance in the marketplace.
The e-commerce giant had launched AmazonSmile in 2013, contributing 0.5% of every purchase made by participating customers to the charity of their choosing.
The e-commerce giant is expected to cut about 10,000 workers, or 3 percent of its corporate workforce.
The retail giant said Tuesday it will launch “Amazon Clinic” in 32 states—but not Indiana—to provide medication refills and care for conditions like allergies, erectile disfunction, hair loss, migraines and urinary tract infections.
The Seattle-based e-commerce behemoth’s weak forecast for the fourth quarter indicates that it expects things to get tougher.
Beginning in October, warehouse and transportation workers would earn between $16 and $26 an hour, depending on their position and location in the U.S.
Amazon controls roughly 38% of online sales in the U.S., more than Walmart, eBay, Apple, Best Buy and Target combined, according to the research firm Insider Intelligence.
Many merchants fear they’ll be forced to cut prices to move a mountain of unsold inventory. It’s an abrupt change from the previous two years when sellers scrambled to get enough products into Amazon warehouses to meet pandemic-fueled demand.
During the second quarter, Amazon’s workforce shrank by roughly 100,000 jobs, to 1.52 million, the biggest quarter-to-quarter contraction in the company’s history.
Amazon is closing the hybrid virtual, in-home care service it’s spent years developing, a surprising move that underscores the challenges it faces as it moves into health care.
