Can Wal-Mart’s Expensive New E-Commerce Operation Compete with Amazon?
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Having said that, I think amazon has left a glaring gap in their armor: you cannot trust your purchases from them anymore, and more and more people are figuring it out.
I have known for a few years to save my high-dollar purchases for more reputable retailers. I bought an all-clad pan from amazon that I am convinced is a factory 2nd. Now, if I want a new Le Creuset, I get it from Williams-Sonoma or Macy's or someplace I can trust.
More recently, however, I realized even low-end purchases are not worth my time. I wanted to buy some frosting tips. After half an hour on Amazon, reading reviews accusing products of being shoddy knock-offs that rust, warp, etc., I realized it's much faster to just drive to a store and buy them. That's what I did, drove to Michael's and bought a set for close to the same price.
I will not be renewing my Amazon Prime membership this year. There's just not enough left that I am willing to buy there to bother.
This is all surprising, cause Bezos is an absolute beast. In fact, if you told me I had to compete against one of the top tech CEOs, I would pray it wasn't him (I would hope for Larry Page...).
How he is missing something so big, this sowing of mistrust, I can't understand. Or it's possible I don't see the bigger game.
Only hard part is making an account, but that only takes a few seconds and much more efficient than sorting through whatever Amazon calls it's search and filtering system.
If they are seen to offer this selection, shoppers will at least begin their product searches on Amazon. Even if many customers opt to eventually buy elsewhere, Amazon will end up with a substantial share of the purchases that result from the initial searches.
The necessity to filter results based on who's selling them and which shipping options they offer has no place on Amazon.
Would you feel the same way if the rating system was right there in-store on a tag?
I understand taking the ratings as a deciding factor; but when I buy odd-things I'm no expert on; I tend to go with gut and middle-of-the-road and I'm hardly disappointed. But that's something I learned from shopping at brick-and-mortar.
The reviews are just evidence that Amazon isn't protecting their reputation very well.
Perhaps the move will be towards specialty stores; as these may be the only competition Amazon may have.
Amazon has launched many brands that they own. (Private Label) and I can guarantee they are making the decisions on these new products from data they gather from third party sellers. You likely already know about the Amazon Basics brand, but it is not the only brand that is owned by Amazon.
I don't know if they will ever remove third party sellers. Just due to the inventory benefits they get from them. And also due to competition from Alibaba (like the Aliexpress site). I think Bezos is more worried about Alibaba than Walmart at this point. Aliexpress is all third party sellers (I believe).
I really think they have a good thing going in terms of allowing for new products to be sold on a large marketplace. It's really great for entrepreneurs and startups with physical products. But, the issue of knock offs is something that needs to be addressed. Many of the knockoffs are so good (or from the same factory) you can't tell the difference. I guess if enough people cancel their memberships because of this and stop using the site maybe they will do something. But, I think for now the benefits for them are outweighing the problems.
Personally I don't buy name brand stuff on Amazon that is from third party sellers. If you look carefully you can tell if it is sold by Amazon or just being fulfilled by them (unless the third party is the brand owner). So far I haven't had any issues with items that are sold directly from Amazon. Sometimes you have to pay more for the item sold by Amazon vs a third party.
Some what unrelated. My biggest rant about Amazon right now is they are doing their own deliveries and they are always late for me. I even had one package lost. I've been shopping on Amazon for a decade I think and never had anything lost before. If I see the tracking number as an Amazon one I'm thinking well who knows if I'll get it.
I've already switched some of my purchases to Jet.com because: 1) I don't want the bother of trying to figure out that products are "real" and not knock-offs 2) For some items (most recently under bed storage containers) I need to know the exact dimensions and I could easily find that on Jet but not on Amazon
However, I still default to Amazon for other items. So I think Wal-Mart can compete, but I seriously doubt that they will beat Amazon.
Jeff Bezos is the Sam Walton of this generation of retail and I don't see anything changing that anytime soon.
As a european I wasn't familiar with Jet.com, but color me impressed - this looks and feels like a way better shopping experience than Amazon's cluttered layout and varying seller quality. If the execution, including fast shipping and great customer support, is at Amazon-level, I'd definitely prefer shopping at jet.
Not only would this crush Amazon, but would simultaneously restore Walmart's reputation as the storefront itself could be more minimalist as more of its space would be used mainly for warehousing.
Seriously. Why aren't they doing this? Does it cost a few orders of magnitude higher than I'm thinking? Wal-Mart presumably has tabs on what its inventory at its own stores are (at least the website does). Wal-Mart, at its peak is pretty close to most people's houses. All they really need is a good operational workflow to reduce the amount of time wasted on inefficient deliveries.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-retail-walmart-delivery-id...
They also do offer delivery in some markets:
https://grocery.walmart.com/help
Here a local grocery partners with some national backend provider to do deliveries; they estimated demand to be fairly low so there are fairly tight windows on when a particular area will receive deliveries. I imagine the economics are comparable for Walmart. Not a lot of money to make demand delivering a toothbrush, but probably worthwhile to schedule delivery of larger batch orders.
They could immediately compete if they offered same-day deliveries ala what Amazon does in certain premium (read: not yours) markets; except for most of America. Branded cars delivering groceries and goods same-day to 90+% of America would be a slam-dunk; and something that would take Amazon years to compete with. Considering all the cash these kinds of companies swim in, it seems like a no-brainer to me. Easy enough for the pizza companies, anyway.
In fact, there's already one local grocery chain offering delivery (and free even, when you spend > $X). To my knowledge, this is becoming more and more popular across the US.
After seeing what Walmart does to small town economies, and knowing that my taxes help compensate for them not paying a livable wage, and reading about their awful lobbying, and their abusive purchase practices, and on, and on, I want nothing to do with them.
Being in a rural area, I have to go well out of my way to avoid physically shopping at Walmart; avoiding them online is easy.
All of that said, the vast majority of consumers don't care about ethics in business, and even if they did, Walmart has their propaganda game down pretty well at this point. They'll do fine.
Oh yeah, and screw Amazon too. My last two orders have been Chinese knock-offs of the products I actually ordered. You know they're in the shitter when you need to reference a third-party website [1] to help avoid forgeries.