E-COMMERCE
Is There a Company That Can Compete With Amazon?
A discussion about a new marketplace that appeared this week
Are businesses built to endure the test of time? Sometimes market forces dictate otherwise or a new kid on the block appears and knocks you out.
For eCommerce companies, there is one tactic that they use to sustain growth, to defend their position, and create value. In effect, they sink revenue back into the business at every opportunity.
This creates a powerful growth-loop.
Consider this industry for a minute. It’s fragmented, over and over again. Products are often created for micro needs, rarely macro. Granular tools, functions, and features appear at breakneck speed. Now consider Amazon.
The sum of all the parts. The industry aspires to be Amazon. Yet Amazon does what others can’t, it consolidates everything under one roof. No viable competitors have yet appeared until now.
This week I noticed one company that looks like a viable threat to Amazon's two-decade dominance. A genuine, full-on competitor has stepped up — Shopify — through their new app, simply called Shop.
Shopify can punch its weight
Amazon has a rival. Shopify. The world’s best-known eCommerce platform has just launched a marketplace that clearly intends to compete directly with Amazon.
At launch, it already has 16 million ‘users’, hundreds of thousands of retailers, and millions of products.
- It’s called ‘Shop’ — plain and simple
- Shopify rolled it out as an App, which automatically puts it in front of millions of phones with zero marketing
- They automatically put every retailer using Shopify directly onto Shop
- It’s basically a digital mall, akin to apps that dominate retail in China
The app also incorporates tracking, purchase history, updates from any merchants that you follow, product recommendations from stores you follow, or purchased from in the past.
Its been in production since 2018, evolving from a previous MVP called ‘Arrive’, which focused purely on the final mile parcel tracking.
Some early benefits I’d like to share with you thus far are:
- It has a native checkout
- It looks and feels social, ready to embed into this world
- Brands can very quickly become sticky
- Small collections work well
- Search will be curated
- An opportunity and challenge for brands to delight customers
Shopify is a real competitor for Amazon. That’s clear.
My advice is to get your ticket and jump onboard folks because the fight of the century is about to begin.
