Many thoughts on this. But they all come down to: it sounds like you think Amazon's current moat is trivial for Wal-Mart to overcome. Should be a few more months now and then Wal-Mart will start to take the ecommerce lead, then ;)
Re:Why Amazon is eating the world
by jessaustin on Monday May 15, 2017 @03:33PM
(#14344416)
This seems to be a sort of excluded-middle error... there is lots of space available in between "Wal-Mart will never threaten Amazon" and "Wal-Mart already drove Amazon out of business". I'd suggest you just shop on Wal-Mart's site; you'll discover they have almost as many shoddy knock-offs for sale as Amazon have...
That's not what Alupis's comments sound like to me. It sounds more like they're saying that if Amazon wins it won't be because they had unique, impossible to reproduce logistics and fulfillment programs. It will due to other factors. (And there are lots of other areas where Amazon has an advantage over Walmart, not the least of which is brand.)
I don't think they're suggesting that Walmart will inevitably overtake Amazon in e-commerce any day now.
I work for a distributor and e-commerce retailer... we've been involved heavily with Amazon (both AFN and MFN) for about 7 years... I'm intimately familiar with how Amazon, Prime, FBA, et al work. Of course it's impossible to know everything about what Amazon does... but I am in the trenches, so to speak.
> There is a very new initiative called Seller-Fulfilled Prime
That's not new... it's been around for years. Big retailers have been doing it for a long time, as they already have their own fulfillment network (see my original post regarding companies that do nothing except fulfillment). It was invite only for quite some time... perhaps that's why you thought it's new.
Another thing you're not accounting for, is of the claimed 42 million SKU's in the Prime program... the overwhelming majority do not sell. This became such a problem, Amazon had to start charging for "dead stock" to motivate sellers to remove dead inventory or not send "slow-movers" in the first place.
You also didn't account for Walmart's drop-ship vendor program. Walmart will take an order, and you drop-ship it on their behalf (Walmart being your customer, not the individual making the purchase). Walmart doesn't need to store all the items in their warehouses...
Amazon has a similar program, but instead of you drop-shipping the items, they buy them from you up front and you ship the inventory to Amazon.
All this doesn't say Amazon's warehouse logistics aren't impressive... because they are... but the FBA mechanism is not something special, and it certainly can be replicated fairly easy (and already has been for the most part). What is unique is the fanfare Amazon receives for every new warehouse that's opened... most companies just open new warehouses as business-as-usual sort of things... no articles are written about those things.