3 Things You May Have Missed in Amazon's Q3 Earnings

For the first time in over two years, e-commerce giant Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) reported lower quarterly earnings. Its third-quarter bottom line of $4.23 per share was not only shy of the year-ago figure of $5.75, it also missed the $4.59 analysts had been expecting. Underscoring the disappointment was a slowing growth pace for the company's cloud computing division, which also missed analysts' revenue outlook.

Amazon didn't exactly paint a rosy picture for the quarter now underway, either. The sales outlook is between $80 billion and $86.5 billion, up from the year-earlier figure of $72.4 billion, but not quite the $87.4 billion the pros were modeling.

It's not difficult to figure out where the added costs are coming from. Although it's driving considerable sales growth, Prime's one-day shipping is costing the company a small fortune, with no end in sight. But that is only one of three details from the quarterly report worth noting.

Source Fool.com