Why Amazon Wins

The one obvious click-batey headline reason.

Staples has its Easy Button but that is all marketing. Shopping at Staples is just as easy or hard as any other big box retailer to buy from online. Sure, you can save your billing details but it’s the same as anywhere else and every Shopify store can do nearly the same.

Way over a decade ago when I was at IBM, we sold WebSphere Commerce. To create the equivalent of a Shopify store could cost half a million dollars per year just for the software. Professional services might triple that number. You ended up with what in today’s standards would be considered a clunky site that was slow and difficult to navigate.

After all that work building a site, you need to push traffic with ads and marketing. It’s exhausting.

From a consumer perspective, it’s price, ease, and availability of a product that’s important for most shopping done. If it gets easier the more often one visits, it makes the service or website sticky.

Amazon gets this right. You can go onto the site and the one click feature removes as many barriers as possible.

Others are trying to emulate but they miss in those key areas: availability and price. You might need to visit disparate sites to find what you need then you need to compare pricing.

PayPal and Shopify attempt to do the one click ordering, but they miss on the availability component. What they really need is a store of stores.

It might take the combined effort of Walmart, Google, Ebay, and others to create a true rival to Amazon in this realm. We need it to keep prices down and to prevent runaway power.