9 ms·

How to Beat Amazon

113 points by joeyespo 9y ago

Upvoter33 9y ago
they forgot: out-execute under promise and over deliver be more agile be willing to break things etc.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
debt 9y ago
I think the best way to beat amazon is just start a shipping company. Creating an online shop is dead simple. Search is solved. If only Prime existed as a SaaS service. Shyp seems to be attempting to do it.
- dawhizkid 9y ago
  Shoprunner
- jjeaff 9y ago
  Prime IS a saas service. It's called fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) and they will warehouse and ship your products whether you sold them on your own site, eBay, or Amazon marketplace.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y ago
Complicating beating Amazon is the fact that it is lead by the arguably the best CEO in all of tech (and maybe in any company). Whatever else may be said about Bezos, he has the ability to think long-term, create new markets, and execute on his vision. He also has the trust of investors who still buy Amazon stock even though he pretty much reinvests all the profits. The combination of existing market dominance, excellent leadership, and ready access to vast amounts of capital is a very hard combination to beat.
- jjeaff 9y ago
  >investors who still buy Amazon stock even though he pretty much reinvests all the profits. But you see, that's the way the game is played. Why siphon down cash and get it double taxed to pay it out as dividends when investors can sell shares as the price rises. This avoids corporate tax and income tax on dividends. You are effectively saving 40% or more by doing it this way. Investors aren't holding out for the day there are finally profits. They are riding their tax preferred profits all the way to the sky as we speak.
  - kspaans 9y ago
    Yes but... any other company could do that instead of paying dividends? What makes AMZN so special?
    - jonknee 9y ago
      Amazon actually has uses for the money. Managers in most firms are so scared of failure that their best idea is to buy back their own shares because it makes the next quarter EPS easier to beat. Few companies are investing in plant/equipment like Amazon.
  - matte_black 9y ago
    I don’t know when I’ll ever get off the AMZN train, I bought stock for my portfolio a few years ago and it’s made me several times more money than what I’ve actually spent shopping on Amazon in the last 10 years! Even if I include AWS!
- perseusprime11 9y ago
  Bezos love for experiments and lack of fear when it comes to failure coupled with the deep pockets that allow him to fail makes it hard to beat Amazon.
godzillabrennus 9y ago
Amazon succeeds by being data driven. http://ShopIn.com http://ShopIn.com is working to move buyer personas out of data silos by decentralize purchasing history onto a federated blockchain. Decentralizing purchasing data should let individual brands compete more equally. It's an ambitious project but should it take off it will provide real world data to make smaller brands more competitive.
- yeukhon 9y ago
  I am not really sure how this is decentralized. Users still depend on your service to be operational in order, no? Then that is not decentralized. Is it the data really decentralizrd then? The infrastructure piece doesn’t seem to be, which makes decentralization existence questionable since, unless the data can be used else where, the data itself is useless. Also when you say data is completely owned by thr user, how are you able to recommend? How do you help your engine to improved? In the end you do need the data. Spotify trains their customer dataset annoymously, which most companies do when they are doing training. So I don’t how this project is any more putting user in control. It’s very vague to me - are you suggesting privacy is honored? That’s what “user is in control” means - I can either share or not share, but what value do you get then?
richmarr 9y ago
This article is talking at the wrong level about Amazon. They're not an ecommerce company anymore. They're an infrastructure provider that cannibalises its ecosystem just slowly enough that nobody panics. Start a business, run it on AWS, do well, they have all your systems metadata and using that can replicate your business. Rinse, repeat. Then there's Lambda and Greengrass... ha We're the Eloi, AWS are the Morlocks. You can't beat the Morlocks with a 'community' play, and the only way 'going niche' will help you is that you'll be too small to pay attention to. [Edit] To make my comment less negative... To beat Amazon you need to get ahead of them on a game they don't already own (or have the capacity to catch up on) and establish yourself as the dominant market in that space. E.g. there's an interesting company in London calle Synthace for example who are building a compiler for pharmacueticals. You write code that defines a manufacturing process and it makes the drugs for you. If they can provide commoditised pharma-as-a-service and evolve a healthy enough ecosystem to build up some value, Amazon will find it hard to replicate and either try to acquire or hunt elsewhere. Yeah it's a bleak view. It's not going to change either because China's ascendance will mean Amazon is the US's strongest buffer against Alibaba, so unlikely to get broken up even it achieves monopoly position.
- yeukhon 9y ago
  > they have all your systems metadata My first thought is this is a very big claim. It sounds like they are “stealing”. They ask what customers want and then build new services based on customers’ reqursts and what could win more customers. Sure they know what their customers do when the customers interact with an account mamager, but we can say the same about every business out there then. Also, AWS is only part of what makes Amazon profitable. Amazon is interested in making itself indispensable, by connecting dots, from online shopping to healthcare to home automation.
- huac 9y ago
  Do you really think hosting on GCP / Azure is going to let you beat Amazon?
getcrunk 9y ago
This is a dumb article
deegles 9y ago
Is it just me or is Amazon doing all of these things already? Create an aspirational brand -> they have tons of in-house brands in many categories, from premium to budget. They're just not usually advertised as being owned by Amazon. Build a community -> Lists, Vine, Reviews, their forums, probably a bunch of other things Personalize your products -> Amazon Merch Deploy an omnichannel strategy -> Retail stores, Treasure Truck, Amazon Go, Whole Foods, Prime Now, Flex, drones... Go niche over mass -> Marketplace Commit to values -> I think the last 20 years have shown that Amazon is pretty committed to investing in growth...
- orionblastar 9y ago
  Amazon announced a way to get lower cost healthcare today. I can only assume they are buying out health insurance and medical groups to make a better network with lower costs, AI ML programs to diagnose illnesses and do administration via automation, ECT. I remember in collage taking business management, that Microsoft and other super giant tech companies have to get into new markets or use tech to lower the cost to customers to beat the competition. I was told Microsoft might buy out banks and get into lending, ECT. Problem is a lot of nursing homes, hospitals etc don't have the budget to automate things or even have a modern computer and OS. If Amazon makes a deal they can run Android apps on Fire Tablets provided for free and have access to an AWS based database. I am sure this won't be the last area they get into, but it will provide growth. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2018/01/30/amazon-berkshire-hathaway-jpmorgan-health-care-deal-could-shake-up-health-care/1078823001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2018/01/30/amazon-berks... Edit: I found a link to cite
- tyingq 9y ago
  Great post, but I take exception on this part: Commit to values -> I think the last 20 years have shown that Amazon is pretty committed to investing in growth... In the article, "values" was alluding to something more altruistic or socially aspirational than growth, capitalism, etc. Amazon's image is pretty weak in this area. Especially around employee culture and truly putting the consumer first.
- IncRnd 9y ago
  > Commit to values -> I think the last 20 years have shown that Amazon is pretty committed to investing in growth... It depends on what you mean by "growth". When you think of Amazon, you probably think of shopping. It’s the site that sells everything from books to phones to full-on vehicles. Accordingly, the company is the dominant player in e-commerce. But as this chart from Statista shows, Amazon’s most well-known business isn’t its biggest driver of profits. That would be the company’s cloud computing unit, Amazon Web Services, which accounted for about 89% of Amazon’s $1 billion total operating profit this past quarter. That’s despite AWS accounting for just 10% of the company’s overall revenue during the same time frame. http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-web-services-cloud-online-shopping-profits-chart-2017-5 http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-web-services-cloud-onl...
mmahemoff 9y ago
I thought, being on HN, this would be about offering a better PaaS product than AWS, but I could have been equally wrong if I'd guessed any of 10+ other industries too (How to beat Amazon at food delivery? Ticket sales? Music distribution? ...)
sjtgraham 9y ago
“How to not compete with Amazon”
icodemuch 9y ago
tldr: the only chance you've got to beat Amazon when building a consumer brand is selling a premium product to a specific niche
andrenotgiant 9y ago
I think people are starting to also notice cracks emerge in Amazon's e-commerce quality as it scales, whether/when it becomes enough of a problem to change shopper behavior is another question, but here are some examples I've seen: - Blatant fake thumbdrives - this entire section is thumb drive scammers using the hack that makes a drive appear larger in system info https://www.amazon.com/s/s/ref=sr_nr_p_n_size_browse-bin_8?fst=as%3Aoff&rh=n%3A172282%2Cn%3A541966%2Cn%3A1292110011%2Cn%3A3151491%2Ck%3Athumb+drive%2Cp_n_size_browse-bin%3A10285020011&keywords=thumb+drive&ie=UTF8&qid=1513525301&rnid=1259751011 https://www.amazon.com/s/s/ref=sr_nr_p_n_size_browse-bin_8?f... - $23 knock-off magsafes rife with fake reviews, that break/fry in days - https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_7?url=search-alias%3Dcomputers&field-keywords=magsafe+charger&sprefix=magsafe%2Caps%2C185&crid=J0KJGT8BMTT6&rh=n%3A541966%2Ck%3Amagsafe+charger https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_7?url=search-alias... - The level of chaos in shopping categories effectively prevents you from doing things like sorting by price or reviews. In my experience, Amazon is always happy to refund on these things and chalk it up as cost of scaling, but when does it start to become too much, similar to what happened to ebay?
- glup 9y ago
  Product quality issues of the above types leave me deeply skeptical that they are ready to be a health care provider.
  - Analog24 9y ago
    Yeah because we all know how much of a problem those fake EC2 instances have become.
    - tyingq 9y ago
      Calling hyperthreads "cores" is a little fake. Also, not being really upfront about the egress pricing vs market price for bandwidth. Especially for the bandwidth charges on egress to AWS direct connect. And not nitpicking. I've had to explain these things to non technical leaders many times when they make on-premisis vs cloud comparisons.
ikeboy 9y ago
I beat Amazon all the time on their own platform. That is, I sell the same items they sell, but for cheaper. But this is merely a tactical localized advantage. If you want to build something that beats Amazon, you need to identify what Amazon either won't or preferably can't do. Some plausible candidates: 1. Consistent prices 2. Customizable prices (ala jet) 3. Products or categories Amazon can't source (surprisingly many, there are a ton of popular items Amazon doesn't sell and a bit of sleuthing can find some of them). One subcategory of this is exclusives of existing brands and licenses, or patented products. Another, quite lucrative category is MLM stuff - it's tough to get them in bulk but the popular ones sell quite well by third parties on Amazon. 4. Trends. A small business can typically react quicker to trends. Lots of small sellers made money on fidget spinner well before big retailers did. 5. Sell to b&m, still 90% of retail. The vast majority of Amazon PL is not in stores. Another thing would be to identify Amazon's profit centers and compete there. They make a ton of money on some items, they lose a ton of money on others. You can profitably compete with the high margin items.
adamio 9y ago
It's hard to beat Amazon on diversification, specialization would be the only way. Until they acquire you
mabbo 9y ago
> it’s certainly not known for its values. Oh, this I disagree with. (Bias note, I work for Amazon but state only my own opinions). Amazon has the Leadership Principles. Google them to see what they are. You may not agree with them, but these values are religion inside the company. It's becoming less so lately (to the detriment of the company, in my view) but they're still values that Amazon is and should be known for their obsession with.
- rorykoehler 9y ago
  I would wager you've been downvoted because no one believes these purported values to be Amazons true values.I had a brief prescreening call with someone at Amazon when i flirted with the idea of applying to work there. They ended the call by pointing me to these values. My first thought while reading them was that they are terribly dishonest. Really turned me off applying there.
toomanybeersies 9y ago
One problem with Amazon is that it's terrible for discoverability. You can't really effectively browse Amazon, because there are too many items, and their categorisation is somewhat lacking due to the range of items they sell. This is where niche websites really come into their element. JetPens comes to mind as a very good example. They sell high end pens (fountain pens etc). Their categorisation is spot on, since all they sell is pens, so I can browse their range of pens and accessories easily. They also have a really good blog and guides to help drive sales. Their price point is ideal for a blog-driven marketing/sales model. After reading a blog article or a guide, I'd happily shell out $25 to try something new, which is conveniently linked to from the blog post.
- dawhizkid 9y ago
  There are all these startups popping up that curate the best products on Amazon, Aliexpress, etc. https://canopy.co/explore/popular https://canopy.co/explore/popular https://thieve.co/ https://thieve.co/ Actually really interesting potential from a biz perspective - nice lifestyle biz if you do it right. Depending on how many purchases you drive you can earn between 4-8.5% of the purchase price.
  - JBlue42 9y ago
    Yeah, camelcamelcamel is the one that comes to mind for me. Also, for Amazon Video, instantwatcher.com, but not sure how they monetize. Way easier on a PC to navigate Amazon Video Prime and Netflix than on their native sites. Amazon still leaves a lot to be desired though.
- JBlue42 9y ago
  Very much this. Their design is one of the most frustrating things about using the website. I'm mainly buying books and maybe some home goods on there. You would think at this point the metadata would be so much better (and I assume it is for their recommendation engine) but browsing, learning about products, etc. is still not as much 'fun'. I'm fine with bare basic but please make it useful.
dawhizkid 9y ago
I'm still kind of amazed by Dollar Shave Club ($1bil exit to Unilever) - absolutely no product innovation (private label S. Korean razor you could've bought on Amazon for cheaper) but brilliant branding/marketing. Objectively Amazon has never had much of a personality brand-wise, and anything you can do to exploit that weakness will help you win customers.
- mooreds 9y ago
  Agree that branding/story is one way to beat Amazon that was touched on, but not fully fleshed out in this post.
- humbertomn 9y ago
  It amazes me too. But we have to remember that although there was no product innovation, there was business model innovation for that niche market. Online subscriptions for razors were not a thing.
bluetwo 9y ago
If you don't know how to beat Amazon, read the Innovator's Dilemma. Just don't buy it on Amazon.
mirimir 9y ago
At some point, doesn't antitrust intervention trigger? Especially once a firm bootstraps across multiple markets? Or is Amazon's market power too small?
scarface74 9y ago
They left out one. If you have a quality brand and you're not trying to compete on price and you have an upscale market, advertise on podcasts. I find most podcast ads to be interesting, maybe not applicable to me directly at the time but a product that would be on the top of my list if I were in the market for that category of item, and a lot of my recommendations come from hearing about products on podcasts. Podcasters seem to be a lot more discerning about which products they will advertise. On the other side of the coin,since most ads for podcast include some type of offer code, you can measure which podcasts are affective at driving sales.
olfactory 9y ago
These are good suggestions for anyone starting an online retailer. But when it comes to overall innovation I'd argue that Amazon is significantly out-innovating Facebook, Apple, and Google, each of which seem afraid to take any big risks or make any obvious long-term bets. I think markets will catch up with this reality at some point. I reorganized my tech stock portfolio to reflect this view yesterday.
misterbowfinger 9y ago
I wonder if Amazon would be open to reselling access to their distribution centers, a la cellular networks. I feel like the upside to them would be enormous.

How to Beat Amazon

113 points by joeyespo 9y ago

Upvoter33 9y ago

they forgot: out-execute under promise and over deliver be more agile be willing to break things etc.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

debt 9y ago

I think the best way to beat amazon is just start a shipping company. Creating an online shop is dead simple. Search is solved. If only Prime existed as a SaaS service. Shyp seems to be attempting to do it.

dawhizkid 9y ago
Shoprunner
jjeaff 9y ago
Prime IS a saas service. It's called fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) and they will warehouse and ship your products whether you sold them on your own site, eBay, or Amazon marketplace.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 9y ago

Complicating beating Amazon is the fact that it is lead by the arguably the best CEO in all of tech (and maybe in any company). Whatever else may be said about Bezos, he has the ability to think long-term, create new markets, and execute on his vision. He also has the trust of investors who still buy Amazon stock even though he pretty much reinvests all the profits. The combination of existing market dominance, excellent leadership, and ready access to vast amounts of capital is a very hard combination to beat.

jjeaff 9y ago
>investors who still buy Amazon stock even though he pretty much reinvests all the profits. But you see, that's the way the game is played. Why siphon down cash and get it double taxed to pay it out as dividends when investors can sell shares as the price rises. This avoids corporate tax and income tax on dividends. You are effectively saving 40% or more by doing it this way. Investors aren't holding out for the day there are finally profits. They are riding their tax preferred profits all the way to the sky as we speak.
- kspaans 9y ago
  Yes but... any other company could do that instead of paying dividends? What makes AMZN so special?
  - jonknee 9y ago
    Amazon actually has uses for the money. Managers in most firms are so scared of failure that their best idea is to buy back their own shares because it makes the next quarter EPS easier to beat. Few companies are investing in plant/equipment like Amazon.
- matte_black 9y ago
  I don’t know when I’ll ever get off the AMZN train, I bought stock for my portfolio a few years ago and it’s made me several times more money than what I’ve actually spent shopping on Amazon in the last 10 years! Even if I include AWS!
perseusprime11 9y ago
Bezos love for experiments and lack of fear when it comes to failure coupled with the deep pockets that allow him to fail makes it hard to beat Amazon.

godzillabrennus 9y ago

Amazon succeeds by being data driven. http://ShopIn.com http://ShopIn.com is working to move buyer personas out of data silos by decentralize purchasing history onto a federated blockchain. Decentralizing purchasing data should let individual brands compete more equally. It's an ambitious project but should it take off it will provide real world data to make smaller brands more competitive.

yeukhon 9y ago
I am not really sure how this is decentralized. Users still depend on your service to be operational in order, no? Then that is not decentralized. Is it the data really decentralizrd then? The infrastructure piece doesn’t seem to be, which makes decentralization existence questionable since, unless the data can be used else where, the data itself is useless. Also when you say data is completely owned by thr user, how are you able to recommend? How do you help your engine to improved? In the end you do need the data. Spotify trains their customer dataset annoymously, which most companies do when they are doing training. So I don’t how this project is any more putting user in control. It’s very vague to me - are you suggesting privacy is honored? That’s what “user is in control” means - I can either share or not share, but what value do you get then?

richmarr 9y ago

This article is talking at the wrong level about Amazon. They're not an ecommerce company anymore. They're an infrastructure provider that cannibalises its ecosystem just slowly enough that nobody panics. Start a business, run it on AWS, do well, they have all your systems metadata and using that can replicate your business. Rinse, repeat. Then there's Lambda and Greengrass... ha We're the Eloi, AWS are the Morlocks. You can't beat the Morlocks with a 'community' play, and the only way 'going niche' will help you is that you'll be too small to pay attention to. [Edit] To make my comment less negative... To beat Amazon you need to get ahead of them on a game they don't already own (or have the capacity to catch up on) and establish yourself as the dominant market in that space. E.g. there's an interesting company in London calle Synthace for example who are building a compiler for pharmacueticals. You write code that defines a manufacturing process and it makes the drugs for you. If they can provide commoditised pharma-as-a-service and evolve a healthy enough ecosystem to build up some value, Amazon will find it hard to replicate and either try to acquire or hunt elsewhere. Yeah it's a bleak view. It's not going to change either because China's ascendance will mean Amazon is the US's strongest buffer against Alibaba, so unlikely to get broken up even it achieves monopoly position.

yeukhon 9y ago
> they have all your systems metadata My first thought is this is a very big claim. It sounds like they are “stealing”. They ask what customers want and then build new services based on customers’ reqursts and what could win more customers. Sure they know what their customers do when the customers interact with an account mamager, but we can say the same about every business out there then. Also, AWS is only part of what makes Amazon profitable. Amazon is interested in making itself indispensable, by connecting dots, from online shopping to healthcare to home automation.
huac 9y ago
Do you really think hosting on GCP / Azure is going to let you beat Amazon?

getcrunk 9y ago

This is a dumb article

deegles 9y ago

Is it just me or is Amazon doing all of these things already? Create an aspirational brand -> they have tons of in-house brands in many categories, from premium to budget. They're just not usually advertised as being owned by Amazon. Build a community -> Lists, Vine, Reviews, their forums, probably a bunch of other things Personalize your products -> Amazon Merch Deploy an omnichannel strategy -> Retail stores, Treasure Truck, Amazon Go, Whole Foods, Prime Now, Flex, drones... Go niche over mass -> Marketplace Commit to values -> I think the last 20 years have shown that Amazon is pretty committed to investing in growth...

orionblastar 9y ago
Amazon announced a way to get lower cost healthcare today. I can only assume they are buying out health insurance and medical groups to make a better network with lower costs, AI ML programs to diagnose illnesses and do administration via automation, ECT. I remember in collage taking business management, that Microsoft and other super giant tech companies have to get into new markets or use tech to lower the cost to customers to beat the competition. I was told Microsoft might buy out banks and get into lending, ECT. Problem is a lot of nursing homes, hospitals etc don't have the budget to automate things or even have a modern computer and OS. If Amazon makes a deal they can run Android apps on Fire Tablets provided for free and have access to an AWS based database. I am sure this won't be the last area they get into, but it will provide growth. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2018/01/30/amazon-berkshire-hathaway-jpmorgan-health-care-deal-could-shake-up-health-care/1078823001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2018/01/30/amazon-berks... Edit: I found a link to cite
tyingq 9y ago
Great post, but I take exception on this part: Commit to values -> I think the last 20 years have shown that Amazon is pretty committed to investing in growth... In the article, "values" was alluding to something more altruistic or socially aspirational than growth, capitalism, etc. Amazon's image is pretty weak in this area. Especially around employee culture and truly putting the consumer first.
IncRnd 9y ago
> Commit to values -> I think the last 20 years have shown that Amazon is pretty committed to investing in growth... It depends on what you mean by "growth". When you think of Amazon, you probably think of shopping. It’s the site that sells everything from books to phones to full-on vehicles. Accordingly, the company is the dominant player in e-commerce. But as this chart from Statista shows, Amazon’s most well-known business isn’t its biggest driver of profits. That would be the company’s cloud computing unit, Amazon Web Services, which accounted for about 89% of Amazon’s $1 billion total operating profit this past quarter. That’s despite AWS accounting for just 10% of the company’s overall revenue during the same time frame. http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-web-services-cloud-online-shopping-profits-chart-2017-5 http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-web-services-cloud-onl...

mmahemoff 9y ago

I thought, being on HN, this would be about offering a better PaaS product than AWS, but I could have been equally wrong if I'd guessed any of 10+ other industries too (How to beat Amazon at food delivery? Ticket sales? Music distribution? ...)

sjtgraham 9y ago

“How to not compete with Amazon”

icodemuch 9y ago

tldr: the only chance you've got to beat Amazon when building a consumer brand is selling a premium product to a specific niche

andrenotgiant 9y ago

I think people are starting to also notice cracks emerge in Amazon's e-commerce quality as it scales, whether/when it becomes enough of a problem to change shopper behavior is another question, but here are some examples I've seen: - Blatant fake thumbdrives - this entire section is thumb drive scammers using the hack that makes a drive appear larger in system info https://www.amazon.com/s/s/ref=sr_nr_p_n_size_browse-bin_8?fst=as%3Aoff&rh=n%3A172282%2Cn%3A541966%2Cn%3A1292110011%2Cn%3A3151491%2Ck%3Athumb+drive%2Cp_n_size_browse-bin%3A10285020011&keywords=thumb+drive&ie=UTF8&qid=1513525301&rnid=1259751011 https://www.amazon.com/s/s/ref=sr_nr_p_n_size_browse-bin_8?f... - $23 knock-off magsafes rife with fake reviews, that break/fry in days - https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_7?url=search-alias%3Dcomputers&field-keywords=magsafe+charger&sprefix=magsafe%2Caps%2C185&crid=J0KJGT8BMTT6&rh=n%3A541966%2Ck%3Amagsafe+charger https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_7?url=search-alias... - The level of chaos in shopping categories effectively prevents you from doing things like sorting by price or reviews. In my experience, Amazon is always happy to refund on these things and chalk it up as cost of scaling, but when does it start to become too much, similar to what happened to ebay?

glup 9y ago
Product quality issues of the above types leave me deeply skeptical that they are ready to be a health care provider.
- Analog24 9y ago
  Yeah because we all know how much of a problem those fake EC2 instances have become.
  - tyingq 9y ago
    Calling hyperthreads "cores" is a little fake. Also, not being really upfront about the egress pricing vs market price for bandwidth. Especially for the bandwidth charges on egress to AWS direct connect. And not nitpicking. I've had to explain these things to non technical leaders many times when they make on-premisis vs cloud comparisons.

ikeboy 9y ago

I beat Amazon all the time on their own platform. That is, I sell the same items they sell, but for cheaper. But this is merely a tactical localized advantage. If you want to build something that beats Amazon, you need to identify what Amazon either won't or preferably can't do. Some plausible candidates: 1. Consistent prices 2. Customizable prices (ala jet) 3. Products or categories Amazon can't source (surprisingly many, there are a ton of popular items Amazon doesn't sell and a bit of sleuthing can find some of them). One subcategory of this is exclusives of existing brands and licenses, or patented products. Another, quite lucrative category is MLM stuff - it's tough to get them in bulk but the popular ones sell quite well by third parties on Amazon. 4. Trends. A small business can typically react quicker to trends. Lots of small sellers made money on fidget spinner well before big retailers did. 5. Sell to b&m, still 90% of retail. The vast majority of Amazon PL is not in stores. Another thing would be to identify Amazon's profit centers and compete there. They make a ton of money on some items, they lose a ton of money on others. You can profitably compete with the high margin items.

adamio 9y ago

It's hard to beat Amazon on diversification, specialization would be the only way. Until they acquire you

mabbo 9y ago

> it’s certainly not known for its values. Oh, this I disagree with. (Bias note, I work for Amazon but state only my own opinions). Amazon has the Leadership Principles. Google them to see what they are. You may not agree with them, but these values are religion inside the company. It's becoming less so lately (to the detriment of the company, in my view) but they're still values that Amazon is and should be known for their obsession with.

rorykoehler 9y ago
I would wager you've been downvoted because no one believes these purported values to be Amazons true values.I had a brief prescreening call with someone at Amazon when i flirted with the idea of applying to work there. They ended the call by pointing me to these values. My first thought while reading them was that they are terribly dishonest. Really turned me off applying there.

toomanybeersies 9y ago

One problem with Amazon is that it's terrible for discoverability. You can't really effectively browse Amazon, because there are too many items, and their categorisation is somewhat lacking due to the range of items they sell. This is where niche websites really come into their element. JetPens comes to mind as a very good example. They sell high end pens (fountain pens etc). Their categorisation is spot on, since all they sell is pens, so I can browse their range of pens and accessories easily. They also have a really good blog and guides to help drive sales. Their price point is ideal for a blog-driven marketing/sales model. After reading a blog article or a guide, I'd happily shell out $25 to try something new, which is conveniently linked to from the blog post.

dawhizkid 9y ago
There are all these startups popping up that curate the best products on Amazon, Aliexpress, etc. https://canopy.co/explore/popular https://canopy.co/explore/popular https://thieve.co/ https://thieve.co/ Actually really interesting potential from a biz perspective - nice lifestyle biz if you do it right. Depending on how many purchases you drive you can earn between 4-8.5% of the purchase price.
- JBlue42 9y ago
  Yeah, camelcamelcamel is the one that comes to mind for me. Also, for Amazon Video, instantwatcher.com, but not sure how they monetize. Way easier on a PC to navigate Amazon Video Prime and Netflix than on their native sites. Amazon still leaves a lot to be desired though.
JBlue42 9y ago
Very much this. Their design is one of the most frustrating things about using the website. I'm mainly buying books and maybe some home goods on there. You would think at this point the metadata would be so much better (and I assume it is for their recommendation engine) but browsing, learning about products, etc. is still not as much 'fun'. I'm fine with bare basic but please make it useful.

dawhizkid 9y ago

I'm still kind of amazed by Dollar Shave Club ($1bil exit to Unilever) - absolutely no product innovation (private label S. Korean razor you could've bought on Amazon for cheaper) but brilliant branding/marketing. Objectively Amazon has never had much of a personality brand-wise, and anything you can do to exploit that weakness will help you win customers.

mooreds 9y ago
Agree that branding/story is one way to beat Amazon that was touched on, but not fully fleshed out in this post.
humbertomn 9y ago
It amazes me too. But we have to remember that although there was no product innovation, there was business model innovation for that niche market. Online subscriptions for razors were not a thing.

bluetwo 9y ago

If you don't know how to beat Amazon, read the Innovator's Dilemma. Just don't buy it on Amazon.

mirimir 9y ago

At some point, doesn't antitrust intervention trigger? Especially once a firm bootstraps across multiple markets? Or is Amazon's market power too small?

scarface74 9y ago

They left out one. If you have a quality brand and you're not trying to compete on price and you have an upscale market, advertise on podcasts. I find most podcast ads to be interesting, maybe not applicable to me directly at the time but a product that would be on the top of my list if I were in the market for that category of item, and a lot of my recommendations come from hearing about products on podcasts. Podcasters seem to be a lot more discerning about which products they will advertise. On the other side of the coin,since most ads for podcast include some type of offer code, you can measure which podcasts are affective at driving sales.

olfactory 9y ago

These are good suggestions for anyone starting an online retailer. But when it comes to overall innovation I'd argue that Amazon is significantly out-innovating Facebook, Apple, and Google, each of which seem afraid to take any big risks or make any obvious long-term bets. I think markets will catch up with this reality at some point. I reorganized my tech stock portfolio to reflect this view yesterday.

misterbowfinger 9y ago

I wonder if Amazon would be open to reselling access to their distribution centers, a la cellular networks. I feel like the upside to them would be enormous.