A Glimpse Into Amazon Lending

When Amazon revealed it had made more than $1 billion in small business loans in 2018, many people were stunned to find out they had become so active as a lender. But other than marketing it to sellers on their own platform, the company has not attempted to draw much attention to it. They have, however, regularly disclosed “seller receivables” which are defined as “amounts due from sellers related to [their] seller lending program.” Assuming the company has consistently kept their loans on balance sheet and kept loan terms steady, one can drawn their own conclusions about the trajectory of its loan program.

Below are the loan receivables as of year-end for each year except for 2022.

2016: $661M
2017: $692M
2018: $710M
2019: $863M
2020: $381M (covid)
2021: $1B
2022 (Q2): $1.3B

Loan receivables dropped significantly during covid and are most recently at their highest level ever, almost double what it had been in 2018.

In addition to its own Amazon Lending product, Amazon is also offering loans through Lendistry and lines of credit through Marcus by Goldman Sachs. The Lendistry relationship, which piloted last year, resulted in $35M being loaned to more than 800 sellers. Because of its success, Lendistry now plans to loan $150M to Amazon sellers over the next 3 years.

The Marcus by Goldman Sachs relationship is notable because it marks Marcus’ first foray into small business lending.