Briefly Retail - Issue 2016 - 7 →

Getting Out Of The Gate

According to Walmart, the world’s largest retailer has tripled its e-commerce selection to 23 million products this year, aiming to better compete with Amazon.com Inc.  While this may seem to be a massive number of items (it is…), it is still dwarfed by Amazon’s product selection of over 350 million products in the US (this includes products from the sellers on Marketplace).  To put this volume challenge into context, during one 16-month period spanning back to 2015, Amazon added nearly 500,000 new products to their assortment every single day.  Read More...

Briefly Retail - Issue 2016 - 6

Loyalty is King

Amazon opened their first physical retail store in Portland just about one year ago.  They have opened two more locations (Portland and San Diego) since then and are projected to open two others (Chicago and Boston) soon.  While Amazon is not exactly known for its brick and mortar retail prowess, they are proving once again that they clearly understand their customer’s purchasing dynamics; aggressively deploying an omni-channel pricing strategy that not only seamlessly connects to their online channel, but uses their dominant Amazon Prime offering to underscore the point.   Read More...

Briefly Retail - Issue 2016 - 5 →

Inner Reflections

 According to Harvard Business Review, more than 70% of organizational transformation efforts fail.  This is an appalling statistic, given the hundreds of millions of dollars that are spent every year in transformation efforts.  It is at the very least indicative of some serious missteps in the approaches we use to plan and prepare for these efforts.  Historically there have been plenty of character actors upon which to assign blame, but the real cause for these failures may actually emanate from within... Read More

Briefly Retail - Issue 2016 - 4 →

If You Can’t Beat ‘Em…

 Historically, retailers have found it difficult to combat the dominance of the mega-retailers during periods of high-volume selling.  By all estimates, this holiday season, which is projected by NRF to exceed last year’s record breaking volume levels, will be no different.  Amazon, WalMart, Apple and Google have all made moves to leverage their not inconsiderable customer share of attention to enhance their own return with key investments in online selling, logistics, retail analytics and loyalty programming.

Read More...

All is Fair in Love and War...But Not in Business →

As we noted in a June newsletter, the largest retail players may be revisiting their pricing and promotional strategies – consciously moving away from a “lowest price guarantee” model - in an effort to capitalize on their market dominance.  We discussed that with Amazon’s well documented growth in search – now pegged at 55% of all direct searches for products - and Walmart’s physical presence, size, matching logistics and continued innovation, perhaps both are feeling that their smaller competition has been so effectively weakened that they are no longer a viable threat.  We suggested at the time that most people might not even notice.

 Well somebody did… Read More