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Last year, Amazon processed over 11,000 U.S. orders every minute — more than six billion U.S. orders for the year. It’s a giant in the online retail sector, which makes it easy to assume it’s a bad-guy in the online retail sector. But what most people don’t realize is that over 60 percent of Amazon’s sales come from small businesses like mine — and its scale and cutting-edge tech and fulfillment capabilities play a vital role in our success.
Fourteen years ago, my wife and I started a personalized gifts business. Our aim was simple: we wanted to offer thoughtful, heartfelt gifts and commemorative items that reminded people of special times — like weddings, family reunions, and birthdays — shared with family and friends. We launched the business from our garage, with a single engraving machine. Our initial product line consisted of just a few classic gifts, including wine glasses, corkscrews, tumblers, and coffee mugs.
Fast forward to 2025, and we’ve got 20 employees here in Coral Springs. Customers can choose from 600 different items — ranging from personalized pie dishes to monogrammed beach bags to engraved pint glasses — all of which can be shipped nationwide.
Thirty years ago, it would have been almost impossible to grow as big or as quickly as we have. With luck, we might have had a profitable shop with a strong local presence, but we’d have had little chance of reaching people beyond the Coral Springs area. Today, online marketplaces like Amazon — as well as Etsy and Walmart, where we also sell — allow us to put our products in front of millions of shoppers every day.
Critically, the marketplaces help ensure our products are shown to the right shoppers every day: Their state-of-the-art, data-driven marketing and advertising tools help place our ads and listings in front of people who’ve been searching for products like ours — helping us get the most bang for our advertising buck. They also offer data analytics that help us see — in real time — which of our ads and marketing efforts are working well, and which are underperforming. That means we can quickly make changes that help boost sales and our bottom line, allowing us to navigate shifting trends and economic conditions.
Digital marketplaces’ advanced shipping and logistics capabilities are also critical to our (and many small sellers’) growth and success. Customers rarely stop to think about it, but it takes the flawless execution of a complex chain of processes to get a package from a small business like ours to their doorstep in 48 hours. We handle shipping for our customized goods, but we use Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) to ship Amazon purchases that don’t need engraving. FBA includes warehousing, packaging, shipping, tracking, and returns — saving us time, money, and operational headaches.
In truth, even the biggest retail players, like Amazon and Walmart, are part of a far bigger retail ecosystem that’s rapidly growing and evolving. Here’s what I mean: You might see our products on Amazon or in Walmart, then purchase them on Etsy or through our BigCommerce-powered website. Or a new retailer might launch on Amazon, use its reach and marketing tools to establish itself, then open brick-and-mortar shops. Others might use social media channels like TikTok and Instagram, but sell through an Amazon storefront — taking advantage of Amazon’s advertising and shipping expertise. And many of our peers in the gift sector sell through online wholesalers like Faire.com, where retailers can purchase products to sell in their online or brick-and-mortar stores.
Online marketplaces like Amazon are big, it’s true — but small businesses’ access to their scale and industry-leading tools means they’re powerful partners. For us, those marketplaces — and the digital retail ecosystem they’ve helped create — give us the reach and capabilities of a retail giant, while allowing us to stay focused on what our small business is all about: creating products that help customers remember special people and moments.
Jason Cipolla is co-founder of Coral Springs-based gift company My Personal Memories.
