Brick and mortar retailers now see Amazon as a terrible Alien Invader into their marketplaces. Shoppers like the “go see, and then buy on Amazon”. Better yet they like the customer experience on Amazon Prime with “free shipping” and “easy returns”. Retailers used to welcome Amazon as a partner and transition to the ecommerce universe.
Amazon may now become the key enabling function to bring expensive big ticket sales to the USA market.
In the 2001/2002 era Target stores used Amazon as their launch into the ecommerce marketplace. Target brough jewelry, apparel, household goods, and electronics to Amazon in a strategic partnership. Now, Target used it’s own website to be an ecommerce portal for many resellers. Walmart has pursued a similar strategy for other sellers on Walmart.com (especially after the Jet.com acquisition). Amazon pursued initiatives to bring major retailers “on ecommerce” yielding good results (Gap, Nordstrom, Lands' End, Eddie Bauer, Target, Marshall Field's, Foot Locker, etc.) then retailers went on to reclaim their online presence with branded websites and large investments.
Target and WalMart haven’t had much success creating the same “kiosk/store-in-store” experiences used in bricks-and-mortar properties on their web portals. Wary consumers quickly learned to use comparison shopping tools seeing where buyer experiences differed from “consumer driven” rhetoric. Amazon now pushes sellers for ‘most favored nation' pricing commitments. (Although this has led to a continuing complaint from the Regulatory Authorities claiming this as a problem.)
Retailers saw huge volumes of revenue go off to Amazon. Kroger’s, Target, and Walmart now see substantial numbers of online orders for groceries and goods pickups bought using their app and online sites. Amazon is still growing same-day deliveries and in-store orders with their Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh offerings.
In our next segment we look at how Amazon shopping is morphing yet again with incoming products on Amazon’s online marketplace.
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