Amazon.com Inc. has had great success in exporting its ecommerce model to Western Europe and Japan. It hasn’t been as consistently successful in less-developed economies, though it’s making a huge investment in India after admitting defeat in China.
But Amazon’s prospects for significant growth in international online retail appear limited. It already operates an online marketplace in 14 of the 20 leading economies by gross domestic product—it also has marketplaces in the United Arab Emirates and Singapore, which are not among the 20 largest economies in the world. And the six countries that remain unpenetrated all pose daunting challenges. Let’s take a look at Amazon’s prospects in those six markets:
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