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December 22, 2020 07:27 pm

How Amazon Wins: By Steamrolling Rivals and Partners

The Wall Street Journal: To keep customers happy, which Mr. Bezos has long said is Amazon's fixation and growth strategy, executives behind the scenes have methodically waged targeted campaigns against rivals and partners alike -- an approach that has changed little through the years, from diapers to footwear. No competitor is too small to draw Amazon's sights. It cloned a line of camera tripods that a small outside company sold on Amazon's site, hurting the vendor's sales so badly it is now a fraction of its original size, the little firm's owner said. Amazon said it didn't violate the company's intellectual-property rights. When Amazon decided to compete with furniture retailer Wayfair, Mr. Bezos's deputies created what they called the Wayfair Parity Team, which studied how Wayfair procured, sold and delivered bulky furniture, eventually replicating a majority of its offerings, said people who worked on the team. Amazon and Wayfair declined to comment on the matter. Amazon set its sights on Allbirds, the maker of popular shoes using natural and recycled materials, and last year launched a shoe called Galen that looks nearly identical to Allbirds' bestseller -- without the environmentally friendly materials and selling for less than half the price. "You can't help but look at a trillion-dollar company putting their muscle and their pockets and their machinations of their algorithms and reviewers and private-label machine all behind something that you've put your career against," said Allbirds Co-CEO Joey Zwillinger. "You have this giant machine creating all these headwinds for us." This year, Amazon has zeroed in on Shopify, a fast-growing Canadian company that helps small merchants create online shops. Amazon has established a secret team, "Project Santos," to replicate parts of Shopify's business model, said people familiar with the project. Amazon executives often initiated efforts like these on their own, though in some cases examined by The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Bezos himself was involved, according to former Amazon executives and internal emails. From its start as an online bookstore 26 years ago, Amazon has expanded into an online retailer with a presence in nearly every major category. It is also the leading provider of cloud-computing services, a gadget maker, a major entertainment player and a rival to United Parcel Service and FedEx. Mr. Bezos is the world's richest man, with a net worth Forbes estimates at $187 billion. He still exhorts employees to consider Amazon a startup. "It is always day one," he likes to say. Day two is "stasis, followed by irrelevance, followed by excruciating, painful decline, followed by death." Mr. Bezos originally considered calling his company Relentless, and www.relentless.com still redirects to Amazon's site.

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