Investing notes. Business, technology, and strategy. In search of long-term business compounders.
I have just a couple of links below centered around e-commerce that I found highly interesting and think worth your time.
I think the narrative around Amazon is starting to shift, not just from a regulatory perspective, but from a dominance perspective. Betting against Amazon has been a loser’s bet, but I think betting that Amazon needs to evolve is a clear one.… Read the rest “Amazon’s Shifting Narrative”
When people think about ecommerce today, they likely think about ecommerce along the lines of C2C (consumer-to-consumer), B2C (business-to-consumer), or B2B (business-to-business) – in other words, classification by type of buyers and sellers.
Or perhaps people think about 1P (1st party) vs 3P (3rd party), depending on whether the ecommerce platform itself engages in the direct buying and selling of goods.… Read the rest “The Future of Ecommerce: Utilitarian vs Social”
As detailed in my recent post, Amazon has built up quite a formidable competitive advantage through Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA). Not just on the demand side, which every happy Prime subscriber is already familiar with, but also on the supply side.
In that post I concluded the following:
… Read the rest “The Other Supply Chain Gorilla That May One Day Challenge Amazon”Fulfillment is clearly beneficial on the demand side, but has a lot of supply side advantages as well.
Amazon has clearly become an absolute juggernaut. There are likely only a handful of companies today that have the resource and scale to compete with Amazon directly. But most of the companies that do have the resources to compete generally don’t operate ecommerce platforms, leaving the field mostly wide open for Amazon to continue to grow unabated.
I have been trying to grapple with the question of why it has been and continues to be so hard to compete against Amazon.… Read the rest “Why Amazon is so Hard to Compete Against”
Lately, there’s been no shortage of positive coverage on Amazon – and for good reasons. The vast majority of retail is struggling with declining same-store-sales, yet, Amazon continues to post a torrid pace of growth despite its size. In FY16, Amazon grew North America segment sales by 25%, and that growth came at the expense of the rest of the retail industry.… Read the rest “Amazon’s Capital Market Dependence”