How Amazon Competes and How to Compete With Amazon

This will be a short article that may lead to a deeper investigation and white paper.

What is Amazon doing besides just selling stuff online that competes with other players?

How are other players competing with Amazon in ways that may or may not include selling online?

Let's take a look at a few examples.

First Amazon.

They are masters at taking something they already do and monetize it in a new way.  They had massive data centers providing web service to Amazon.com that was mostly not in use.  They needed the massive power for their busy times.  Why not sell it as a service?

Amazon Web Services was born and now you too can host anything you can dream of in "the cloud".

This was quickly followed by others.  Microsoft Azure has found its place and there are countless players in the space now.

Here is one way Amazon is vertically integrating, taking some upstream or downstream product or service and creating a way to do it themselves.  Package delivery.

Amazon Orders Vans for Prime Delivery

Next are a couple of players that took Amazon eCommerce ideas and started providing the same solution for others.

This company is called Mirakl, a Paris based company, that has created a platform for other eCommerce sites to add resellers, just like Amazon.com does. They're the only player in the space and are big already, especially in B2B, and will be growing dramatically in the years ahead.  I promise you.

https://www.mirakl.com/

Next is a similar concept.  The product reviews that worked so well on Amazon.com became something you can add to your own eCommerce site.  Now there are multiple other players in this space but the original may still be the best.

https://www.bazaarvoice.com/

I think these responses are the correct path for all but the largest retailers.  I used to refer to retailers in a Tier level segmentation, Tiers 1 to 5.  Tier 1 was Walmart while Tier 5 was the local YMCA Christmas Tree sellers. I think there is now a super-tier reserved for those who do brick & mortar well, digital well, and eCommerce well.  How can smaller and regional players compete?  Third party providers.

Here is a great example:

https://www.retaildive.com/news/perfect-corp-rolls-out-makeup-ar-tool-for-small-businesses/559242/

Hope this gave you some food for thought.

Happy Reading,

J.W. Gant