Why isn't there more competition for Amazon?

[AreaCode707]

One thing to remember is that Amazon sales also benefit other businesses -- if you buy a CD or a lamp from Amazon, they buy it from someone else and pay that company.

So that 33% is the share of store front sales, not of product sales. It's nothing like the 90% monopoly on desktop OS sales that Microsoft has.

If you go to Amazon to buy a lamp, they offer literally thousands, from dozens of companies. They give you the chance to support any lamp maker you want. If some hand-crafty "artisan" lamp maker wants to they can even sell their lamps through Amazon as a third party seller.

So: competition among lamp makers is massively increased, and consumer choice is massively increased.

The way they dominated in their first product line, books, was by offering buyers a hundred times the selection of a Barnes and Noble brick and mortar store. This helped smaller publishers and niche authors immensely. They now make it easy to by-pass publishers and self-publish your e-book for their Kindle reader, and their Kindle apps that work on almost every device.

Again, a huge increase in the choices we have for products, and (unlike Wal-mart) it's done by having an open and ever-increasing selection of products and companies.

It might get bad if Amazon has 75% of the online store front business someday, maybe. But they don't have the incentive to squeeze lamp makers or shoe companies the way Wal-mart does, because they don't need to have every product priced cheaply. They sell lamps priced from $5 to $500 and let you choose.

I forget how it's worded exactly but one of Bezos' goals is to basically allow anyone to buy literally ANYTHING on Amazon. Like, you can think of it and it's currently produced, it's on Amazon. That focus on selection is what led them to build Marketplace rather than trying to hoard sales to only their own product lines. Their desire to provide consumers ultimate choice is what led them to build FBA (Fulfillment By Amazon) so that they can store and ship third party goods so that non-Amazon sellers were not disadvantaged by shipping.

I have to say, especially now that I work at a different massive global company, Amazon is incredibly good at consumer focus and at taking a simple idea and executing on it to the point of sheer untouchable brilliance.

People want stuff fast = insane deals with shipping vendors, insane improvements (and empowerment of employees to speak up about process improvement) in the distribution centers, incredible discounts and bundling on shipping, etc. That's the most observable pattern but that razor focus holds true on most of their projects. It's a strenuous and demanding environment, but it does yield benefit for the end user.