There is so much about Amazon that is clearly in the 'Day 2' territory. I am not as swayed by one day shipping as the author is. Yes, its a big challenge and yes it makes things even more likely that Amazon will hurt brick and mortar stores (as an experiment look at the commercial retail space in your town and see how many 'things' retailers there are. Not as many as there were, and in some places entire city blocks have given way to 'services' retailers (salons and restaurants)
Amazon continues to struggle with counterfeits in their inventory. They continue to struggle with market vendors who give shoddy service. They continue to struggle with customer perception when something is "sold by amazon" and then ships from Malaysia by boat. They continue to have failures in even their 2 day "prime" when the two days only starts when the item ships, and it can take a week for an item to go from "ordered" to "shipped". And as they crack down on both buyer and seller fraud, it gets harder for legitimate customers to make a return claim.
That is a good question, back when I was younger the question was "Could anyone kill Sears and Roebuck?" for much the same reasons. Using the history of Sears, and how they lost their lock on retail America, if Amazon dies the same way it will because there will be other choices that are give customers something that they want while Amazon fails to change (aka Day 2 type behavior).
For example, if your chance of getting something counterfeit on Amazon was 50% and to return it would take several days. Then a new company that focused on only legitimate merchandise and easy returns would start eating away at Amazon's volume. Now that is just an example, not saying it is going to happen, but another closer to home experience was Fry's Electronics where more and more often they would take customer returns, shrink wrap them and stick them back on the shelf. I once bought a DVD drive there open the box to find it contained a CDROM that clearly someone had taken out of their computer and replaced with a DVD drive (same thing I was doing). When I went to take it back the store said "How do we know you aren't the one who swapped it?" It took about 40 minutes but we found the serial number on the box had been previously returned the week before. From that point on I made a point of opening the package at the store to insure I wasn't getting the odd second hand "re-gifted" product.
I am already unwilling to go to Amazon for products that are easily copied.
I'm not bearish on Amazon, but it seems realistic that someone could build an aggregator of Shopify (or other owner-operated storefronts) sites. For example, a Shopify aggregator/product search engine that had any kind of meaningful traction could try to build a checkout integration with merchants using Shopify payments and take a cut of revenue, or just sell ads the same way Amazon does.
Maybe this already exists to some extent, and I'm sure there's a lot I'm not considering, but I think it's exceedingly realistic to build a competitor to Amazon that focuses on addressing some core complaints of both sides of the marketplace: product quality, counterfeiting, and producer control.
Should caveat that I'm ignoring AWS entirely and am aware of the irony that there's a substantial chance an Amazon competitor would be built on top of Amazon's infra.
// product quality, counterfeiting, and producer control
Those all come from a single reason: commingling - mixing the same product but from different sellers, when fulling an order.
I could see shopify setting up a system of letting sellers buy a certain original product from a manufacturer - and sending it to some warehouse and selling it on their aggregated store.
Let's say this solves co-mingling.
Than it would a be a great time for Amazon to copy that.
> I could see shopify setting up a system of letting sellers buy a certain original product from a manufacturer - and sending it to some warehouse and selling it on their aggregated store.
Isn't this just dropshipping (already an extremely popular behavior on Shopify). The aggregator I'm describing is one where the aggregator is just solving product discovery, but limited to non-Amazon storefronts, ideally limited to the product's owner, even if white labeled (doesn't entirely solve the quality issue, but would help with explicit counterfeiting at least). A core part of the value prop would be that it gives you direct access to the seller (some of whom may explicitly not list on Amazon) without Amazon as an intermediary.
Google kind of does this, but one of the reasons people go to Amazon is they know the entire SERP will be products, so if they're ready to buy, it's often the fastest way to get to place where they can click "Buy". The aggregator I'm thinking of is really a more aggressively curated, non-Amazon version of this.
Product search is about more than "discovery". You need to categorize products to distinguish variations like size and color. That requires real human curators and a revenue stream to pay them.
Categorization is very possible without human curation, particularly if you're ingesting structured data (as would be likely in the case of a Shopify site aggregator/search engine). And the idea wouldn't be for this to be non-revenue generating, it would generate revenue via revshare on purchases or ads.
Amazon continues to struggle with counterfeits in their inventory. They continue to struggle with market vendors who give shoddy service. They continue to struggle with customer perception when something is "sold by amazon" and then ships from Malaysia by boat. They continue to have failures in even their 2 day "prime" when the two days only starts when the item ships, and it can take a week for an item to go from "ordered" to "shipped". And as they crack down on both buyer and seller fraud, it gets harder for legitimate customers to make a return claim.
All in all I am pretty bearish on them.