You must know that I am not so much into those kind of extremist vision about the evolution of commerce. But French Ecommerce trail blazer Jacques Antoine Granjon, CEO of vente-privée.com has discussed about that topic recently during an Ecommerce event organized by the Electronic Business Group (EBG).
He considers Amazon is the largest dumping organization that has ever existed. It could go on with its dumping for 20, 30, 40 years, offering the best prices and combining it with free shipping, which gives them a great competitive edge. Indeed, Amazon could lower their margins by compensating it with the revenues they get from their Cloud computing activities. This strategy could last forever until they kill all the other traditional brick & mortar forms of commerce.
He considers Amazon is the largest dumping organization that has ever existed. It could go on with its dumping for 20, 30, 40 years, offering the best prices and combining it with free shipping, which gives them a great competitive edge. Indeed, Amazon could lower their margins by compensating it with the revenues they get from their Cloud computing activities. This strategy could last forever until they kill all the other traditional brick & mortar forms of commerce.
To be honest, I don't see this fact happening. Of course, obviously, Amazon has a very aggressive strategy. They have also a great long term vision on how to invest in order to reach their next steps in terms of retailing.
But you can clearly see that brick & mortar has still a bright future ahead of it. Because commerce is a social activity, and people will always need to see and feel products during their decision making process. Moreover, let's not forget that stores have a real importance in terms of logistics. People will always have interest to go to stores to get their products, especially in the FMCG world.
Now, obviously, there are still a lot of things that will happen within the next few years, and Amazon will probably get more breakthroughs. But I believe there will be a lot of new things coming up soon that will show out how brick & mortar business will still grow and get better.
