NRF President and CEO Matthew Shay speaks with Worldwide Amazon Stores CEO Doug Herrington at NRF 2025.
Feeling uncertain about bold moves and the possibility of failure in the ever-changing tech landscape? Take heart: Even Doug Herrington, CEO of Worldwide Amazon Stores, admits his first handful of years in ecommerce were filled with “a tremendous amount of failure.”
“But I also learned I loved it,” he told the audience at NRF 2025: Retail’s Big Show. “I was having a ton of fun. I loved building. I loved inventing.”
Herrington, at the event for the first time, shared the stage with National Retail Federation President and CEO Matthew Shay. Herrington was “awestruck” by it all, and impressed by the innovation he’d seen and heard from fellow retailers. No customer shops at a single retailer, he said. “We, of course, all vigorously compete for those customers, but the more we compete, the better off customers are.”
He took the crowd through his own career journey — originally thinking he’d be an economics professor but discovering his love of retail while working as a consultant — as well as Amazon’s expansive growth, credited to founder Jeff Bezos’ “pretty simple retail strategy.” That strategy includes relentless focus on lowering prices, adding selection and improving customer convenience.
Bezos knew those sources of customer value would never change, Herrington said, and this allowed for bold decisions. On the list: going multi-category (growing selection); adding sellers (also selection); and launching the Prime program (convenience). Prime at $79 a year was controversial; even Herrington had doubts. Today, Prime offers free shipping on 300 million items, and tens of millions of items with same-day or next-day shipping.
As a consultant, Herrington loved the “hyper-competitive environment” among his retail and CPG clients. He took his traditional retail experience to the ecommerce space, joining an online grocery pioneer that “spectacularly” went bust. So, too, did his own startup, an online content retailer. He came to Amazon in 2005 to start its consumables business; back then, it was still primarily a bookstore. He’s been involved in a variety of aspects since.
As someone who loves to build, he said, he figured he’d stay for a couple of years, then return to startups. “I’ve been here for 20 years now, and it really feels like a big startup factory to me, and I love that.” He took on his current role in 2022.
Amazon has a strong belief in the importance of speed: The faster it delivers, the more people shop; conversion rates rise with a faster delivery promise on a product detail page. In addition, customers who experience faster delivery return sooner and shop more when they do.
Doubling down on speed, then, has meant very large, fundamental changes to Amazon's network. The outbound network was rewired to a series of regional networks; the inbound network was rebuilt; and the number of “same-day” buildings combining fulfilment and delivery doubled.
Worldwide Amazon Stores CEO Doug Herrington speaks at NRF 2025.
As for AI, Herrington started an ongoing AI “show-and-tell” in his office. Applicable results include the conversational shopping assistant “Rufus,” improved fit recommendations for apparel, summaries of reviews, and the rewriting of product titles “on the fly” to be more helpful to customers, based on what they’re searching for.
AI technology is also saving “hundreds of millions” of dollars in back-end processes, and improving numerous aspects of the supply chain.
“It’s a big investment,” he said. “It’s an eye-opening investment, if nothing else. But given the breadth of opportunity and the general nature of it, I think it’s a prudent bet that we’re making. It’s going to touch all of us, all of our businesses. It’s going to lower costs, it’s going to improve quality, it’s going to help us develop new customer experiences, and it may even spawn new retail formats. It should be really exciting.”
Herrington quoted Bezos, saying it’s not a love of innovation that has set the company apart. Rather, it’s a willingness to fail. Innovation and failure are “inseparable twins,” he said, and there’s a bias toward the “institutional yes” at the company, where it takes only one yes from a senior leader to move a project forward, rather than one no to stop it. The result is a culture that generates bold ideas and takes thoughtful risk in pursuit of those ideas.
“Jeff was always very clear,” Herrington said. “He used to have this lesson, which was, in the history of business, more value had been destroyed by companies that failed to try something new they should have than by people who tried things that failed. That advice always stuck with me. I think it sticks with me especially right now during this AI transformation that we’re going through. Personally, I think we’re going to continue to err a bit on the side of innovation. We’ll probably have our share of failures as well. But hopefully, we’ll continue to deliver some successes, too.”