Just this week, author Brad Stone’s book, “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon hit store shelves, and, not surprisingly, is also available on the Amazon.com website.
Tedmag.com has been following Amazon’s emergence in the electrical distribution chain over the past year, with the newly created website amazonsupply.com. We are committed to informing you about the online threats to the supply chain, and thanks to the new book we know a little more about the strategy Bezos is using.
Earlier this week, Stone took part in an hour long interview on National Public Radio’s “Fresh Air” show, to talk about what he now knows about Amazon chief Jeff Bezos, and his strategy moving forward. Stone says Bezos was preparing to expand beyond just selling books about 15 years ago.
“In fact, in 1998 when a VP came to him and showed him that Amazon’s market was going to be very limited because unfortunately a lot of people don’t read, he was not bothered by that at all,” Stone reports. “He told some of his minions to go study the good markets that might be next.”
Stone also believes Bezos is not really telling the truth when he says the company is customer based and not competitor focused.
“Bezos believes he doesn’t have any big advantages, so he has to weave together a chain of small advantages. He’s incredibly analytical, incredibly strategic and he looks for many points of leverage and he wields that as an advantage against his competitors. I would say Bezos is enormously aware of who his competitors are, and he rushes to assemble these chains of small adavantages that can help him win.”
Stone told “Fresh Air” he believes Bezos was committed to expand distribution in 2000, but he wanted to research them before committing. And Stone believes Bezos is not after a profit in any of his new ideas.
“As an Amazon shareholder or analyst will tell you, profit, frustratingly, is not something Bezos or Amazon are after. They’re after customer loyalty. They want to lock up the market. They want customers to make Amazon their destination for all of their shopping.”
And surprisingly, Stone believes part of the reason we have a Marketplace Fairness Act before congress, something NAED strongly supports, is partly because Bezos used his strategy to prevent states from passing their own sales tax laws.
“Look at how Amazon managed the sales tax issue over the past 5 years. They’ve been masterful since 2008, as states started to feel pressure to raise revenue during the recession. Bezos went and fought, state by state, these internet sales tax efforts. Amazon was ruthless.”
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