Amazon wants to help retailers do everything

7/28/2015

Seattle – Amazon.com continues its evolution into a full-service technology platform with three services essentially designed to help retailers do everything. These services include support for start-ups, expansion of the Amazon Aurora database engine, and a hosted fulfillment/logistics platform.



First, Amazon is introducing Amazon Launchpad, a new program that makes it easy for startups to launch, market, and distribute their products to hundreds of millions of Amazon customers across the globe. The program offers a streamlined onboarding experience, custom product pages, a comprehensive marketing package, and access to Amazon’s global fulfillment network, all geared toward helping startups successfully launch and promote themselves.



“As the pace of innovation continues to increase within the startup community, we want to help customers discover these unique products and learn the inspiration behind them,” said Jim Adkins, VP, Amazon. “We also know from talking to startups that bringing a new product to market successfully can be just as challenging as building it. Amazon Launchpad gives customers access to a dedicated storefront featuring a variety of innovative new products from emerging brands. For startups, we handle inventory management, order fulfillment, customer service, and more, allowing them to focus their efforts on the innovation that results in more cool products.”



Amazon is working with more than 25 venture capital firms, startup accelerators, and crowd-funding platforms to bring startups into the Amazon Launchpad program. Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator, and Indiegogo are a few of the companies that have funded the more than 200 products currently available in the Amazon Launchpad store.



Furthermore, Amazon Web Services Inc. is making Amazon Aurora, a MySQL-compatible database engine, available to all customers. Tests show that Amazon Aurora can provide up to five times better performance than the typical MySQL database, and availability as good or better than commercial databases, scaled to the largest enterprise deployments.



Amazon Aurora automatically replicates data and continuously backs up data to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), which is designed for 99.999999999% durability without performance impact. Amazon Aurora is designed to offer greater than 99.99% availability and automatically detect and recover from most database failures in less than 60 seconds, without crash recovery or the need to rebuild database caches. Amazon Aurora continually monitors instance health and if there is a failure, it will automatically failover to a read replica without loss of data.



Amazon Aurora is now available as a database engine for Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) in the U.S. East (northern Virginia), U.S. West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland) regions, and will expand to additional regions in the coming months. Amazon RDS for MySQL customers can convert their existing MySQL databases to Amazon Aurora with one click in the AWS Management Console.



Meanwhile, the Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA) program handles the promoting, order taking, warehousing and shipping for anyone who wants to sell or resell products. FBA is growing by 50% or more year after year and includes sellers from 100 different countries fulfilling orders to customers in 185 countries.


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