Business Quotes

Lowering prices is easy. Being able to afford to lower prices is hard.

Your brand is formed primarily, not by what your company says about itself, but what the company does.

You want to look at what other companies are doing. It's very important not to be hermetically sealed. But you don't want to look at it as if, 'OK, we're going to copy that.' You want to look at it and say, 'That's very interesting. What can we be inspired to do as a result of that?' And then put your own unique twist on it.

The balance of power is shifting toward consumers and away from companies. The right way to respond to this if you are a company is toput the vast majority of your energy, attention and dollars into building a great product or service and put a smaller amount into shoutingabout it, marketing it.

We've got thousands of investors counting on us. And we're a team of thousands of employees all counting on each other. That's fun.

There are a whole bunch of people who don't like to shop. But there are also people, maybe, who even do like to shop but are very time pressured. And so shopping online can save people time.

It's very important for entrepreneurs to be realistic. So if you believe on that first day while you're writing the business plan that there's a 70 percent chance that the whole thing will fail, then that kind of relieves the pressure of self-doubt.

I think one of the things people don't understand is we can build more shareholder value by lowering product prices than we can by trying to raise margins. It's a more patient approach, but we think it leads to a stronger, healthier company. It also serves customers much, much better.

We've done price elasticity studies, and the answer is always that we should raise prices. We don't do that because we believe, and we have to take this as an article of faith, that by keeping our prices very, very low, we earn trust with customers over time, and that actually does maximize free cash flow over the long term.

We were hoping to build a small profitable company; and of course, what we've done is build a large, unprofitable company.

There are multiple ways to be externally focused that are very successful. You can be customer-focused or competitor-focused. Some people are internally focused, and if they reach critical mass, they can tip the whole company.

What characteristics do I look for when hiring somebody? That's one of the questions I ask when interviewing. I want to know what kind of people they would hire.

The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There's something wrong with the way you are measuring it.

You can have the best technology, you can have the best business model, but if the storytelling isn't amazing, it won't matter. Nobody will watch.

If I have three good decisions a day, that's enough.

One of the things we don't do very well at Amazon is a me-too product offering. So when I look at physical retail stores, it's very well served, the people who operate physical retail stores are very good at it...the question we would always have before we would embark on such a thing is: What's the idea? What would we do that would be different? How would it be better? We don't want to just do things because we can do them...we don't want to be redundant.

Friends congratulate me after a quarterly-earnings announcement and say, 'Good job, great quarter '... And I'll say, 'Thank you, but that quarter was baked three years ago. I'm working on a quarter that'll happen in 2021 right now.'

It's hard to remember for you guys, but for me it's like yesterday I was driving the packages to the post office myself, and hoping one day we could afford a forklift.

Focus on cost improvement makes it possible for us to afford lower prices, which drives growth. Growth spreads fixed costs across more sales, reducing cost per unit, which makes possible more price reductions. Customers like this, and it's good for shareholders. Please expect us to repeat this loop.

If we can arrange things in such a way that our interests are aligned with our customers, then in the long term that will work out really well for customers and it will work out really well for Amazon.