Amazon’s growth into one of the largest ecommerce and fulfillment operations has obviously come at the expense of the growth of competitive retailers and ecommerce sites. The sheer size and scale of Amazon’s operations provides opportunities for economies and tactics unavailable to traditional retailers. Amazon’s delivery service is now the largest package delivery provider by package count in North America. Instead of merely being a consumer of package delivery services Amazon is now a competitor at scale with huge economies and high investment history. This scale also enables competitors to launch new, or experimental, operations at scale as they mount Alien Invasions into marketspaces.
Alien Invaders need technology enabling, keen business models, and operational/product expertise to succeed. In this release EkaLore looks at some of the capabilities and scale Amazon brings to enterprises to launch an Alien Invasion.
Amazon has been expanding fashion and fulfillment choices from their success in shoes (Zappos) and some experiments with clothing in Amazon Basics. An investment by Amazon into fulfillment capabilities and capacity has added “large format” items like furnishings, outdoor goods, and large-sized goods where fulfillment previously was difficult, or expensive, using traditional consumer-door delivery services. Amazon’s investment covered special warehouse facilities for large format goods, delivery provisioning, and integration into Amazon’s fulfillment operations.
Launching into a new retail market has been a complex planning and execution process. Plans had to combine:
product management,
logistics, merchandising operations (including marketing, advertising, and placement),
retail presence (bricks and mortar, locations, staffing, tiers of supervisors and managers),
technology-based systems (finance, inventory, marketing management, customer research, manufacturing management, data integration, etc.), and
financial management (investment, cashflow, treasury operations, asset life cycles,etc.)
In our next segment we look at how Amazon shopping is morphing yet again with big ticket items coming to Amazon’s online marketplace.
For further analysis and information on Alien Invasions of marketplaces please see
To see how tactics and strategies combine to counter an Alien Invasion, or make one, please contact us at
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