Amazon as a Benchmark

Amazon has emerged as the 800–lb gorilla of E-Commerce and some pundits believe that smaller retailers will get squashed in the expected slugfest between Amazon and Walmart. Based on my own experience with Amazon, however, I’m not at all sure.

I LOVE Amazon and buy everything I can there. Often, as is increasingly the case with many shoppers, I’ll go straight to Amazon and search for what I want before – or without -trying anywhere else. I’m an Amazon Prime member and 2–day free shipping is fabulous – especially when shipping from another retailer costs an arm and a leg. On average I buy something from Amazon once per week – last year I spent a little over $3000.

On the other hand, Amazon constantly drives me nuts because their Findability in some areas – particularly electronics and computers is annoyingly poor. It’s OK if you know exactly what you want but if you need to look at and understand alternatives, choosing the right product on Amazon can be a real pain because the attributes you need to narrow your selection are just not there.

Perhaps Amazon’s failure to provide attributes of significant depth in many categories is due to product data problems – like Comparative Search Engines, a lot of data is provided by independent merchants. Whatever the reason, Amazon loses a fair chunk of my business – e.g. today I bought a set of toner cartridges for a color printer ($200) on another website (one I have never used before) because I wasn’t able to understand – or trust – the choices presented to me – and I wasn’t sure I had isolated all the relevant choices.

I’ll be posting more examples of Amazon’s pluses and minuses but, for now, the key takeaway is that while Amazon is definitely the 800–lb gorilla there’s plenty of room for savvy merchants to hold their own.