{"id":13015,"date":"2019-07-28T11:48:25","date_gmt":"2019-07-28T06:18:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/?p=13015"},"modified":"2020-02-10T10:39:16","modified_gmt":"2020-02-10T05:09:16","slug":"vs-amazon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/2019\/07\/28\/vs-amazon\/","title":{"rendered":"vs Amazon"},"content":{"rendered":"

I had an interesting conversation with a start-up founder recently, one whose business had received multiple rounds of funding and is scaling well. Our chat soon moved into listing on Amazon\/other horizontals, and I was reminded of my post from earlier this year – The Shrinking Shelf Life of Ecosystems<\/a><\/em>. I had written how the advantages of dominating the triumvirate – distribution, product and brand – now have a shrinking shelf life.<\/p>\n

I had taken DTC brands as an example of this.\u00a0But while that is relatively true and there are enough unicorns<\/a> around, in absolute terms, the distribution might of Amazon and other horizontals continues to be formidable. In this insightful post – Bonsai Brands<\/a> – Simon Andrews explains that while it might be “easy” to get about $50m, the journey to $100m and beyond gets tougher because efficiencies start maxing out. They could remain viable businesses at a certain scale.<\/p>\n

But VC money has different expectations, and that’s where listing on Amazon etc starts becoming a conversation. Especially when Amazon sees DTC brands<\/a> as a part of its relentless march towards being the “everything store”.\u00a0 IMO, that’s the beginning of a systematic slide towards losing all advantages accrued thus far, and becoming a commodity. But that’s a different post!<\/p>\n

My thoughts were on what a competitor to Amazon’s increasing dominance would be like. I think it’s going to be near-impossible to out-Amazon Amazon! But both Facebook and Google have their own paths moving inevitably towards a collision. The former, with commerce on its own platform, Instagram and Whatsapp, and the new play -Libra, and the latter sneaking in on domains like flights, and steadily building Maps<\/a> as a “super app”!<\/p>\n

I had a few other thoughts too – a v2 of a Unilever or P&G that would create a house of brands, a holding company if you will, with a distribution-product-brand strategy that factors in the new rules of the game, and also leverages existing economies of scale. But that, I think, is wishful thinking. I even thought of a VC model which could build a structure of verticals and horizontals – the former being front end businesses and brands which handle core areas like product, brand and marketing, and the latter consisting of infrastructure – distribution, tech, logistics and so on.<\/p>\n

However, as always, Ben Thompson introduced a great perspective<\/a> on this\u00a0 – Shopify, which is a platform as opposed to Amazon, which is an aggregator. Do read the post for the really interesting detailing of this premise.<\/p>\n

But if I had to really bet on a good fight, it would feature WeChat, the big daddy of super apps – messaging, commerce and payments for everything from banking to food delivery, mini-programs, O2O, games and utilities – the depth and breadth is astounding (a quick primer<\/a>). Of course, privacy concerns are equally concerning, especially since the playground is China, but the concept is already being replicated by Grab, Go-Jek, Line etc.<\/p>\n

It has all the makings of an East vs West classic!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An interesting conversation on listing on Amazon led me to think about what a legit competitor to that giant will look like. Walmart’s efforts have been around trying to out-Amazon Amazon, and I wouldn’t bet on that ending well. But there exist interesting possibilities, outside of Facebook and Google as well. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,2538],"tags":[2607,5806,5733,5807,3821,4589],"class_list":["post-13015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet","category-ideas","tag-amazon","tag-bonsai-brands","tag-dtc","tag-ecosystems","tag-spotify","tag-wechat"],"aioseo_notices":[],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13015","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13015"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13015\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14228,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13015\/revisions\/14228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}