I will happily speak on first experience via competition with Amazon via e-commerce. Amazon does two things really well, delivers a product to you very fast and makes it beyond easy to return (within 30 days). I am only speaking to amazon selling its own goods, not 3rd party sellers.
As a retailer, Amazon is merely a competitor in the space. If your business model is the exact same as Amazon’s; i.e., you do not provide any extra value to your customers besides shipping and returns – its a game you are going to lose at. Funding is key here, and they have more than you do.
However, the differentiator is service in product knowledge. Being the everything of products gives Amazon a weakness. They don’t specialize in products. The only way you can judge if products are good or bad is mob mentality or “star rating” by quantity and overall rating. Its a good scale, but may not give you what you need tailored to you.
So if you want to compete, offer something unique: service in the product. Know your products, which in turn helps you know your customer. You will build loyalty and word of mouth. If you can ship and return as fast as Amazon does, you have got a triple threat success tactic while they have a double.
Best of luck out there retailers.
About Author
Edward Richter
15 years in ecommerce with 5 exits ranging from industrial goods, electronics, home & garden as well as power equipment with a heavy amount of revenue focused on Amazon.
About 10 years ago, my electronics dot com began to grow our Amazon presence. We went from doing 10 orders per day to 1000 on Amazon within just a few months. All that growth was great, however, we found that keeping up with Amazon’s strict rules of ODR and upkeeping 95%+ feedback was hard.
Over the last decade, our focus has always been customer service in all of my retail companies, and while I welcomed Amazon’s strict rules and SLA’s, it was still a challenge to get to 99% error-free orders based upon Amazon’s ODR metrics.
We began to build parts of our team that would focus on reducing negative feedback, claims etc, but there was always those cases where the feedback or claim was not fair and not warranted. Sometimes a product claim vs. our service etc. In the beginning, it was easy to tell Amazon something was wrong and they would fix and remove the feedback. As time went on, especially in 2018, it became near impossible.
This is where FeedbackFixers was born. We have built and perfected a process in house through a decade of feedback experience as an FBM retailer for working with unpleasant feedback. Our passion is to service the customer, but it is also to make it fair and give the ability to small business’s to succeed on Amazon with our amazing service.
