Amazon’s Jeff Bezos looks to the future

It is Cyber Monday – the biggest day of ecommerce in North America and the main benefactor of press coverage is Amazon.com. After watching the 60 Minutes interview that Charlie Rose did with Jeff Bezos, a few things come to mind. It is clear that Bezos is trying to do so PR work after the Everything Store written by Brad Stone made him seem to be a draconian leader. I dont believe in coincidences as the timing of this interview just seems to good to be true.

Timing is everything

As I have mentioned today is Cyber Monday and the 14 minute interview that Charlie Rose did can be seen as an advertorial as Bezos mentioned the normal lines “customer centric”, “we like to innovate” etc.

If you look closely at the video then Amazon fashion gets a favorable amount of time. AmazonFresh is also given some airtime and I must be honest – after giving it months of thought the fact that Amazon took 5 years to figure out a business model for the grocery business, that should scare competitors. AWS is a dark horse for me at the moment as Amazon has been reluctant to mention the size of the business and their partners that use the software platform.
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Amazon goes grocery shopping outside Seattle

Jeff Bezos must be the pied piper of commerce. His creation Amazon is slowly moving out of its traditional market (online) and disrupting retail. He clearly wants to ensure that Amazon can supply any product to any shopper in the US. (International focus is to intensify in the next 5 years in my opinion as current countries of operation become saturated)

The onslaught into retail and the high street started with the Amazon Price Check app. The idea was to enable shoppers to scan and compare products and then buy through Amazon at a discount.  In this specific case Bezos used the shopper as an intelligence network that would enable Amazon to create pricing data for retailer product.  It is telling that this happened in 2011 and if one looks back it was the beginning of their challenge to retailers in the US.

On Dec. 10, Amazon promoted a new “Price Check” mobile phone app by offering shoppers a 5% discount—valid only for that one day—on items they found in brick-and-mortar stores, but purchased online through Amazon instead. The app enables in-store shoppers to scan or snap a photo of a product. It then immediately compares prices with Amazon’s. The app is prompting an outcry from small retailers, who say the site is using their independent stores as its own showroom.

“The goal of the Price Check app is to make it as easy as possible for customers to access product information, pricing information, and customer reviews, just as they would on the Web, while shopping in a major retail chain store,” he said.

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