This question originally appeared on Quora: How much would it cost to buy one of everything on Amazon $AMZN? Answer by Kynan Eng, who works in brain-related research & commercialization at universities and startups.
It would cost about $12.86 billion to buy one of everything on Amazon. I calculated this value as follows:
To estimate the average price of all Amazon items, I followed the following procedure:
By the time I had 100 non-zero items, I had collected 104 items in total (100 non-zero price, two free, two not available). So we have valid price data on 102 items. Below is a frequency price distribution histogram for the 102 items. The median price was $14.16. The number of unavailable items is estimated as 488 million * (2/104), leaving us with 479 million available items.
Interesting point: One item cost $588.50. If this item is removed, the mean changes to $21.30 with a SEM of $2.36. That outlier has a big influence, but is probably valid in indicating the long tail of Amazon item prices.
For full disclosure, here is the list of random products. (data obtained 2016-01-26).
If someone reading this works in Amazon IT infrastructure, I guess it would be quite easy for them to simply pull up the relevant database tables and do this calculation exactly.
