'We are not a killer': Amazon sees future for high street retail hand in hand with e-commerce

The world is much more complex than the way it is described sometimes.

They are divinely discontent.

When your customers are happy, your business thrives.

Hello and welcome to The Big Question, where we speak to the biggest names in business about some of the most pressing issues on today's agenda.

And today I'm thrilled to be joined by Mariangela Marcellia, Vice President, EU Stores at Amazon.

Mariangela, thanks for coming on the show and welcome.

Thanks for having me.

So, first of all, talk a bit about Amazon's impact on the European economy.

Very often you hear that Amazon is kind of killing high street commerce.

What are some of the key stats?

It's actually the opposite, if I may,

because we are, I think, a big force for support of the European economy.

Only in 2024, we invested 55 billion euros in the European economy.

To put things in perspective, this is more or less one quarter of the budget of the European Union, just to give an idea.

This translates, of course, in a significant impact on GDP and independent companies have estimated that the impact that our investments generate are more or less 41 billion euros, which is the economy of Latvia or Estonia.

That is a huge number.

And talk a bit about the number of employees.

How many people

are Amazon employees and where are they located and concentrated?

Right.

So we do employ 230,000 people, permanent employee, full-time jobs in Europe.

Huge number.

In the U27, so excluding the UK, this number is 150,000

And these are jobs from all types of backgrounds, from entry level jobs in logistics to very high qualified engineers that works with AI and robotics.

What I'm particularly proud of is that we create jobs in areas of the continent where it's needed the most.

For example, north of France is a good example and a recent one.

This was a region that had a very strong heritage in industry, but suffered from deindustrialization.

And in this region, we created over 3,000 jobs.

These are lives.

These are people that were born in the north of France that could make a life in the north of France, didn't need to move in other parts of the country.

And when we hear these stories, we are very proud of what we are doing in Europe.

As Amazon has grown, we can now buy almost anything anywhere across Europe and have things delivered to our home.

What is the environmental impact of this model compared to delivering to a store where people need to go?

There are independent studies that show that actually e-commerce has between 1.5 and 2.9 lower impact in terms of greenhouse gas emission compared to real commerce.

Why is that?

The reason is that we use technology to optimize our supply chain, our delivery routes, et cetera, and this saves multiple trips to a store.

So basically it takes out cars from the street and eventually produce less greenhouse gas emission.

Do you see the relative decline of high street commerce and the emergence of e-commerce as a sort of natural development of the industry?

I think we should work backwards from what customers do.

And customers are not either high street or e-commerce.

They do both.

So my view is that e-commerce and traditional retail should coexist because this is what customers want.

They want to have the optionality to shop wherever they want, wherever it is more convenient for them.

So I don't envision a dystopic future where e-commerce will kill high street.

I do see a present and a future where e-commerce and traditional commerce will coexist.

We do have physical shops in the US and even in the UK, for example,

And still, we have a very good and strong online business.

The world is much more complex than the way it is described sometimes.

How has e-commerce changed the habit of shopping?

And how do you see that developing?

We have over 127,000 small and medium European businesses that thrive thanks to Amazon.

And we are not a killer.

We are actually an ally, a catalyst for their growth.

People buy what they need.

not more no less they buy everything and this is why we call us the everything store so it is a very convenient way of accessing a vast variety of goods and it is also an opportunity for companies that sometimes don't find

space on the limited shelves of offline stores.

When I started working in Amazon, I was managing the book business, for example, and we offered on our infinite shelves millions and millions of books, including foreign language books and books hard to find.

And normally these items don't find a space in a regular bookstore.

So it is really complementary to traditional

Are you noticing any trends among customers?

They want to be able to buy everything and with a speed and the level of service that is really surprising them.

Keep on surprising them.

And what was surprising when I started this job 15 years ago in Amazon is not surprising anymore.

They are divinely discontent.

And this is what keeps us on our toes.

So when I joined Amazon, I'm Italian, so the post service was three, four, five days.

And when Amazon started and provided to Prime customers shipping in two days, that was bloody fast.

Now, if you tell customers, I'm gonna ship you in two days, they will say,

Really?

So they want same day and so the bar keeps on increasing and we need to stay current to that in order to delight our customers.

When your customers are happy, your business thrives.

These days everybody's talking about artificial intelligence.

I want to do that too.

Yes.

How is AI changing the way you operate?

Yeah, well, AI is everywhere and is in everything that we do and has been for the last 25 years.

It was not generative AI, it was more machine learning, but in everything we do from logistic processes to the way we present our products to our customers, AI is everywhere.

One of the big trends in this very moment is AI and personalization of shopping.

What this means is that customers today can ask our personal assistant, Rufus, hey, Rufus, I'm a tennis player, not a professional one.

I used to play quite well 10 years ago, but I haven't played anymore in the last 10 years.

Can you please recommend me a good racket that I can use?

And in a matter of seconds, Rufus provides three options that are exactly the options that customers need.

So very personalized shopping experience.

What this does is that it allows this person to save money and save time.

Big win, I think.

So AI is there to change the way we shop, the way we do everything, basically.

All right.

Mariangela Marcellia, Vice President, EU Stores at Amazon.

Thank you so much for this conversation.

It's been a pleasure.

Thank you.