Tariffs Affect Everyone, But Perhaps No Company More Than Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN)

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Apr 28, 2:44PM EDT

Key Points

Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) risks losing both first-party and third-party sales as tariffs on Chinese goods force suppliers to cancel orders and potentially exit the platform.
The company faces a dual impact from tariffs—on its own imported inventory and on vendor-supplied goods, threatening its core e-commerce revenue stream.
Continued trade tension may also pressure Amazon’s underperforming international segment, compounding challenges beyond its strong AWS business.

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Transcript:

[00:00:04] Doug McIntyre: The whole tariff things touches a lot of people, but, to say the least, if, you look at a company that touches maybe the most people in the United States is Amazon. I mean, who doesn’t have an Amazon account? Amazon has a problem. And that is, is that its vendors are going to get hit by these tariffs.

[00:00:26] Doug McIntyre: Yep. And do those people dial back? Do they drop out? if I’m somebody who’s selling, inexpensive watches. $50 watches, right? And all of a sudden I was making $32 on ’em, and now I’m gonna make $49 before shipments. And Amazon’s my primary conduit to the consumer. I may say I ain’t, and Amazon obviously takes a piece of the action.

[00:00:57] Doug McIntyre: I may just close up for a while and wait.

[00:01:00] Lee Jackson: Well, and Amazon has been canceling orders for all sorts of stuff that they buy from China. I mean, beach chairs and small air conditioners and there’s countless items that I’ve seen and canceling stuff is probably the worst thing for anybody, to, even imagine.

[00:01:24] Lee Jackson: Yeah. So Amazon, that’s, a retailer or a supplier out of them, out of China. So yeah, that, when I, read that the other day, I was like, wow, and they get.

[00:01:38] Doug McIntyre: In terms of what they do, in terms of what they purchase and then they get hit in terms of what their third party resale.

[00:01:47] Lee Jackson: There’s a double whammy there.

[00:01:49] Doug McIntyre: Yeah. Amazon has a potential double whammy when it comes to what I would describe, I know people like AWS, but Amazon’s primary business really is still e-commerce and, it’ll get hit.

[00:02:03] Doug McIntyre: What’s interesting, and I don’t know enough about this, people ignore Amazon International. If you look at the Amazon, they shouldn’t. There are three parts to it. There’s the domestic part, there’s the international part, which never makes any money, and there’s a WSI wonder what it does to Amazon’s international business if these tariffs get really bad.

[00:02:27] Lee Jackson: Well, it, it, undoubtedly could hurt it. And it’s interesting how. Amazon of big tech. all of Big Tech has their venue, their silo of huge income. And Amazon, if they can continue to build, add items to their program line, if they do add TikTok like we’ve discussed in the past or things like that, this is just another feather for a cap that’s extremely strong.

[00:03:00] Lee Jackson: Yeah, it is. But canceling product. Canceling product. There’s somebody in China who’s gonna, who’s, they’re not gonna be happy over that.

[00:03:09] Doug McIntyre: Nope, not at all.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.