Just as Google won the search engine wars by helping people find what they are looking for, the e-commerce winners will be the companies that help people find what they want to buy (reliably and with confidence).
Retail companies are blind to just what a shit-show their websites are (a lot of them even have ads in their online store). Any company that solves this problem for their sector will win it, and this is good news for techies as every company can and should have a unique solution.
It doesn't have total domination of ecommerce but frankly it'd run into anti-trust issues if it did. No company is going to do ecommerce bigger than amazon without getting broken up so yeah... amazon.
Moving more and more away from Amazon. If I especially like a product or company, I'll see if it costs about the same to buy direct and do that. I've found that lots of companies actually have better deals on their site or offer a coupon.
You're also far less likely to receive a fraudulent product buying direct from the company versus Amazon thanks to the third party sellers and commingling of inventory.
(1) Yes, I know that Amazon sells some millions or some such different products, but my experience shopping (recently moved and have done a LOT of shopping) is that the company making the product can have a good enough Web site that shows much wider range of products, e.g., for wool blankets many more colors and patterns.
(2) To me the key to Amazon is their quite well done Web site that makes it easy (a) to find products and (b) to get relatively good information about them. But can do well on (a) with just keyword searching at Google, Bing. For (b) can do well at the Web site of company making (importing, whatever) the product.
Then, yes, Amazon also pleases customers with better, faster, cheaper shipping options, their Prime program, good returns policies, relatively close warehouses (Walmart stands to do really well on this as they get their Web site polished), customer reviews of products, Amazon Choice house brand, one account for all the wide Amazon product choices instead of (having to type in banking, shipping details for) accounts at each of a few dozen companies, etc. I have found that if just go shopping at whatever on-line retail sites, can get some bad products, worse than my experience at Amazon; so, Amazon can have some trust from selecting relatively good product. It may be that Amazon can be responsive: The mid-tower case server I built supports error correcting coding (ECC) on both the motherboard and the processor; so I explained to Amazon that for their main memory sticks (DIMMs, duel in-line memory modules) they should offer ECC; they did, and maybe my suggestion helped. Still, IMHO the keys to Amazon have been just (a) and (b).
From the shopping I've done recently, it appears that a lot of retail Web sites just copy a LOT of software architecture and design from the Amazon Web site. So, we can expect that building such a retail Web site is becoming a widely, well understood art and, thus, no longer an advantage for Amazon. Indeed, the company might host their site at Amazon's cloud server farm AWS -- irony here!
Net, it looks to me like the US manufacturers and/or importers can start to do well cutting out the middleman Amazon. Ah, Internet disintermediation!!
Uh, shipping from many local warehouses? When I was at FedEx, and maybe still, shippers could just truck their inventory to Memphis and, thus, get faster, cheaper delivery to their customers -- order in before midnight and delivery before 10 AM the next day, that is, in about 10 hours. Well, FedEx and UPS could still do such -- open a few hundred warehouses, let vendors stock the warehouses with big trucks and deliver to customers with little trucks (bicycles, taxicabs, drones?). Again, a dozing if not sleeping giant here is Walmart.
Amazon has made lots of products more discoverable. But that's only one component of "help me find what I'm looking for."
Case in point: I'm in the market for a new TV. Based on my experience with prior TVs, I believe I want something with high contrast, low reflections (glare), low response time, and high color gamut coverage. Well, some balance of those criteria weighed against price. I'm new to the TV market: how do I find this (on Amazon or elsewhere?)
If I expand, the situation might seem worse. I'm tangentially familiar with two modern display technologies: LCD and LED. I know LEDs offer higher contrast and quicker response time. So I search for LED TV on Amazon. Most of the results do indeed have "LED" and "TV" in the name, and nothing on the product page suggests anything different. But look up detailed specs for that model (which takes some determination in and of itself) and it has none of the characteristics of an LED TV. The contrast is low, the response time is high, in fact it turns out it's an LCD TV! Apparently the industry markets using LED to mean LED _backlight_, which to me was misleading. So what class of TV will get me what I'm after? There are places to figure it all out, but Amazon sure as hell isn't one of them. Nor is Best Buy, Walmart, or most other retailers you've heard of. They still do an awful job helping you find what you're looking for in many cases.
Then click the red text "Explore Articles & Videos", just above the listings on the right side. Their TV Buying Guide has good visual explanation of LED-LCD vs. OLED, for instance.
Depending what you look for, calling them and chatting can work too.
// Keep in mind with any review site or retailer, paid review placement can be a thing.
Amazon is definitely the clear leader but both major brands and small companies could do better with a site focused to their own goods. In a lot of ways, most tech companies already do this but retail just hasn't caught on yet.
Discovery (if it's not on Amazon it doesn't exist, to many online shoppers—no, seriously) convenience (I already have an Amazon account) and confidence (yes Amazon is a shitty flea market at this point, but they're a shitty flea market with a known and fairly reliable return policy) matter a lot. Not sure how to solve those issues with a bunch of brand-specific sites.
> Retail companies are blind to just what a shit-show their websites are
shit-show or not, when I'm buying something online I strongly prefer buying directly from the company's website over using sites like Amazon.
My purchasing pattern goes like this: I want something, I search (using DDG) the web for what companies offer what I want, then I go through the companies websites to decide on where I'm going to make my purchase.
I'm certain that I don't represent the most common sort of customer, but I'm also certain that I'm not alone. Ads are irrelevant to me (I block all scripting, so I rarely see ads), so if a business wants to increase the chances that I'll check them out, what they really need to do is SEO.
Retail companies are blind to just what a shit-show their websites are (a lot of them even have ads in their online store). Any company that solves this problem for their sector will win it, and this is good news for techies as every company can and should have a unique solution.