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> A town is more open to competition, anytime a third player can open up a store with relatively small investment. Meanwhile to take on a dominant player like Amazon is extremely hard.

You think it's easier to open a physical store to compete with Walmart than to spin up an ecommerce site to compete with Amazon?

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A physical store, at a minimum, has built in advertising based on location. Budget in local advertising and people will shop there if prices, service, location, and the products are good. I couldnt even imagine how a new online store would be able to start competing with Amazon. There are existing webstores that over the years have lost a lot of business to amazon (Newegg, Sweetwater, B&H Photo, etc). Even local stores are losing business to amazon.

For sure. There are so many more parameters to physical store. Proximity is a HUGE one. Quality of service. Specific items that they stock. These kinds of things allow smaller stores to exist in my small town even while there is a huge supermarket nearby.

On the other hand, I do not use ANY one-stop site for online shopping outside of Amazon.

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