Slashdot Mirror
Amazon May Handle 30% Of All US Retail Sales (usatoday.com)
An anonymous reader quotes USA Today:
Amazon's yearly sales account for about 15% of total U.S. consumer online sales, according to the company's statements and the Department of Commerce. But the Seattle e-commerce company may actually be handling double that amount -- 20% to 30% of all U.S. retail goods sold online -- thanks to the volume of sales it transacts for third parties on its website and app. Only a portion of those sales add to its revenue.
"The punchline is that Amazon's twice as big as people give them credit for, because there's this iceberg under the surface, but you only see the tip," said Scot Wingo, executive chairman of Channel Advisor, an e-commerce software company that works with thousands of online sellers. When third-party sales are taken into account, Amazon's share of what U.S. shoppers spend online could be as high as $125 billion yearly...
Amazon's share will grow even larger when they can offer two-hour deliveries, warns one analyst, while another puts it more succinctly. "Amazon's just going to slowly grab more and more of your wallet."
"The punchline is that Amazon's twice as big as people give them credit for, because there's this iceberg under the surface, but you only see the tip," said Scot Wingo, executive chairman of Channel Advisor, an e-commerce software company that works with thousands of online sellers. When third-party sales are taken into account, Amazon's share of what U.S. shoppers spend online could be as high as $125 billion yearly...
Amazon's share will grow even larger when they can offer two-hour deliveries, warns one analyst, while another puts it more succinctly. "Amazon's just going to slowly grab more and more of your wallet."
30% of all retail sales (as in the headline), or 30% of all consumer online sales (as in the body)? There's a big difference.
No, they won't take more out of your wallet (at this time). It's money that you'd spend anyway, but instead of going to several merchants it'll simply go to one place.
On the other hand, when it all goes to one place, prices will go up and there'll be no alternatives left ...
"How did this happen? Who's to blame? Well certainly there are those who are more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable. But again, truth be told...if you're looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror.
I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn't be? War. Terror. Disease. There were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got the best of you and in your panic, you turned to the now High Chancellor Jeff Bezos. He promised you order. He promised you peace. And all he demanded in return was your silent, obedient consent."
I spend $0 with Amazon, and I buy everything locally.
I don't respond to AC's.
no matter where or who. OK: Amazon is not there yet, but is heading in that direction. Its size gives it unrivalled negotiating power that will help it to cement its position. Having said that: I don't know what to do about it; suggestions please.
I know it's a problem. As soon as they've KO'd their competition they'll jack up prices and things will be a lot worse. But what am I suppose to do? I don't buy a lot of stuff I don't need (a video game or two a year). Since my income doesn't keep pace with inflation (I'm not even gonna say "any more", it never has) the only way to keep my head above water is hope I can find somebody willing to sell me stuff cheaper. Yeah, It's a race to the bottom. But I don't see myself getting a new set of wheels this year (e.g. higher paying job) and the only way out of this race is to crash and burn Dale Earnhardt style...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Amazon's just going to slowly grab more and more of your wallet
As long as their competition continues to not "get it" Amazon is going to continue to grow. I go to amazon because I can buy absolutely anything there, and it will be cheaper there than anywhere else. Amazons third party sales thing is absolutely brilliant as it brings more products to amazon, and brings more customers to the site.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
Literally every time I go into a store there are less goods on the shelf. More cheap plastic crap. Lack of organization. Most shops stocking exactly the same good fro the same suppliers and more or less the same prices. Overpriced prices.
Sometimes you walk into a store (strangely usually toy stores for some reason) and they are Old School. Shelfs brimming with colorful, well priced products, filling you with an irresistible urge to just fucking buy. I have to walk past the Lego Isle to get to the games section of the local Toy Store, and it is DIFFICULT to resist temptation and I don't even own lego anymore. But that's really the last bastion of the retail I remember.
Head down to most stores on the high street and they're stocked like some estate sale of a deceased 90 year old. Retail assistants who don't know shit. Absentee owners. Chuggers everywhere. Decor and construction like a cheap TV set. Yes this even happens in malls now. Every store knows they have nothing to offer you but their 15% mark-up. People used to spend ALL DAY at the mall. That would be like a punishment now.
I fucking hate buying online. I hate the risk. I hate the delay. I hate returns. But fuck it retail is doing jack shit for me these days.
there were many red-flag touches.
Headline: 30% of all US retail sales.
Article: 30% of all US *online* retail sales
"Amazon's just going to slowly grab more and more", that's a weird way of looking at the fact that many of us absolutely love Amazon and choose to do business with them to save ourselves time and money. They're not grabbing anything, I choose to spend my money there.
hahaha - groceries included - that's retail too, right?
I am trying to avoid this monster as much as possible - takes smaller companies down.
Amazon May Handle 30% Of All US Retail Sales
Implication: Amazon might handle 30% of all US retail sales but they might not because we don't know.
Proper headline:
Amazon Handles 20% To 30% Of All US Retail Sales
Implication: Amazon definitely handles somewhere between 20% and 30% of all US retail sales
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I do buy a fair amount of stuff from Amazon, but I'm at least as likely to go to eBay when I want something. If I'm shocked and appalled by the prices I find in both places, then I will start googling. Often, I just go ahead and check them both right away, both for the price comparison and because their searches sometimes turn up substantially different results for the same keywords.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
At least here in the US there seems to be a growing backlash against online retailers, Amazon especially. A large part of this is due to counterfeit products being misrepresented. When you have a million products on your site it's very difficult to properly vet each product and each provider. This is damaging the Amazon brand and similar online sellers with all but the lowest of the consumer, those that shop strictly by price and treat every product as if it is a commodity.
TFA says they handle 15% of all online retail sales, maybe 20%-30% if you include third party sales handled through Amazon. Online sales comprise only 8.1% of all retail sales. So Amazon's (very small) slice of the whole pie is just 1.2%, possibly 1.6%-2.4% if you include their third party affiliates.
Amazon barely cracked the top-10 stores in retail sales for 2015. There's a tendency for people who like to be online to over-exaggerate the effect of the Internet. Retail sales are still very much a brick and mortar business.
While there may be many problems with Amazon concentrating so much power in one company, I don't cry much for the many greedy layers there have traditionally been between me and the manufacturer. I am happy to give my money to the people who make something. I am not happy to give money to the layer after layer after layer of people who have managed to insinuate themselves between the manufacturer and me.
Often distributors would force manufacturers to sign exclusive regional distribution agreements that then allowed them to lock the price for a large area. The retailers would then spend zillions of dollars marketing at me which they then had to recoup. Then there are the malls and other landowners who charge retailers exorbitant rents that need to be recouped. And then there are the greedy retailers themselves who would gouge the crap out of me while treating their retail employees like crap.
While Amazon has certainly been abusive to their own employees, I have not heard tell of them abusing their suppliers. They don't let large conglomerates shove out minor players from the Amazon shelves. If a small manufacturer sells a great widget at a great price, garnering great reviews, then the giantco that traditionally owned that space needs to up their game or see the minor player start to get some serious traction in that market. Normally giantco would turn to the distributors and retail giants and tell them to cut the minor player out of the loop, assuming that the minor player could have even gotten onto any shelves in the first place.
This bookends with people cutting off all forms of traditional media; thus cutting off all forms of traditional brand marketing. If a company XYZ wants to sell me a thing, and their amazon reviews are the best and their price is good, I will buy that widget without even having a slight guess as to how many 10s of millions giantco spent marketing their second rate pile of junk.
If you go back just a few years, you would find people nervous to stray from what they had been brow-beaten into believing was the proper thing to do. Now they do their own homework and come to their own conclusions. This is no small thing. I know more and more people who are doing a vast percentage of their shopping on Amazon and they don't have their favourite brands, they don't buy brands I have previously heard of, and they certainly aren't buying from companies that have multi billion dollar advertising budgets for their entire product lineup. Or if they do it is only because that product managed to actually win on its own merits.
There are a few exceptions such as Apple, but even these brands are losing their luster because people are no longer being told what to buy at all the levels from marketing to the in-store experience.
I went into a mall the other day (because there was an office that I needed to visit) I looked around the mall and was disgusted. The prices were bonkers, and the employees were there for the hard sell. They provided negative value for the customer. People aren't generally stupid and as time progresses more and more people will join the ranks of those who have left brand and store front retail behind.
There may be layers of middlemen but Amazon is more expensive than brick and mortar retail in many product categories. What difference does it make if there are layers of middlemen if Amazon will just take all that money for itself, and more?
> choose how often I want a product and when I want it delivered.
Target offers something like that.
http://www.target.com/c/target...
I was thinking Walmart did too, but I'm not sure. I do know that at Walmart you can shop online, then go pick it up when your order is ready, and they'll load it in your car.
"The punchline is that Amazon's twice as big as people give them credit for
That's because they're not counting the contract workers that Amazon mistreats.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
They don't care if you get fake product and warehouse it that way.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Amazon are easy to use and usually have what I want.
When I go to another store, I usually find the buying experience is problematic - for example, you must register an account to find out how much postage costs.
Amazon have blundered recently though. The introduction of paid reviewed devestated the usefulness of the review system, because paid reviews always or almost always give five stars.
The upshot of this is the the average score shown for each item in a list of items is now useless (unless you look at each item, you have no idea if there are or are not paid reviews, so every average rating is suspect), and when you do want to look at reviews, you have to *read each one fully*, to check if it's a paid-for review (there has to be a sentence in there somewhere which says something like "I received a discount"), which is time consuming, particularly so as they tend to be verbose and there's no standing format for indicating this information.
Before, you could just scan down the reviews and see what people thought.
I might have hoped Amazon would have kept track of which reviews were paid for and which not so they could roll back if necessary, but I do not think this was done.
As the years pass, the damage will heal up, as the products with paid for reviews become unavailable.
i.e., United States of Amazon.
Last 3 videogame preorders... all arrived AFTER promised delivery date and did not even freaking ship until release day.
If you like playing release day games, dont go with Amazon.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
the government is incompetent.