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It's worth noting that Amazon's selection is orders of magnitude larger than Sears' ever was. This isn't solely or even primarily because there are more product

It's worth noting that Amazon's selection is orders of magnitude larger than Sears' ever was. This isn't solely or even primarily because there are more products available today, nor is it an accident. Sears (and pretty much every other retailer in the '90s) always offered a curated selection of products. If you went to them looking for a fedora, you'd have maybe four or five different options to choose from. A quick search on Amazon returns over 3,000 results (when limited to the "men's fashion" department). Instead of building a select portfolio of products, Amazon's model is to sell as many different items as they possibly can (with a few strategic omissions). There's an important paradigm shift here that needs to be considered. The idea of going to one place (what's a website again?) to find every variation ever made of every item you can possibly think of was completely foreign to people in 1993. In a nutshell, you can't GET to Amazon without going through Ebay. So what would have happened had Sears' tried-and-true curation model come to dominate online shopping early on? It's hard to say obviously, but it still would have been ripe for disruption, from people who saw the online marketplace a bit differently.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago
I actually prefer Sears model. At least there was some minimum of quality I could expect. In addition, I could be fairly certain that I would not get a counterfeit. This is one of the reasons I loce shopping at Costco, good quality, good prices, excellent service.
gutnor 8y ago
Indeed you are right, that's what people kept talking about when Amazon started to rise in popularity: long tail sales strategy. They had everything that you simply couldn't get anywhere else, a strategy that only an online shop could manage. Borders and other big chain had a similar-ish strategy, however they were hampered by their physical shops: they are forced to curate to fit floor space and, for a customer, delivery is not a positive outcome of going to a physical shop, so it does not matter how fast you can get something if it takes longer than the customer is willing to stay in the shop. Amazon has continued to refine its online shop, but the key was to always offer as much as possible, even offering themselves as a platform to independent seller in order to vastly increase their catalogue. ( I have done business with amazon sellers that had sold only a handful of time per year, for a perishable product - that's ultra long tail )

RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago

I actually prefer Sears model. At least there was some minimum of quality I could expect. In addition, I could be fairly certain that I would not get a counterfeit. This is one of the reasons I loce shopping at Costco, good quality, good prices, excellent service.

gutnor 8y ago

Indeed you are right, that's what people kept talking about when Amazon started to rise in popularity: long tail sales strategy. They had everything that you simply couldn't get anywhere else, a strategy that only an online shop could manage. Borders and other big chain had a similar-ish strategy, however they were hampered by their physical shops: they are forced to curate to fit floor space and, for a customer, delivery is not a positive outcome of going to a physical shop, so it does not matter how fast you can get something if it takes longer than the customer is willing to stay in the shop. Amazon has continued to refine its online shop, but the key was to always offer as much as possible, even offering themselves as a platform to independent seller in order to vastly increase their catalogue. ( I have done business with amazon sellers that had sold only a handful of time per year, for a perishable product - that's ultra long tail )