What's new on Amazon's Plan to Take Over the World

Amazon has in the past few years, brought the word "disruption" to the retail industry. Read on.

This article was first published on Star Cloud Services, read the long version here.

This year, in 2017, it's being called the "retail apocalypse" as Amazon, e-commerce growth and decline in department store retail chain sales has brought about the biggest store closure and bankruptcy run since 2008.

In fact, 2017 could possibly exceed 2008 as the worst.

Doom and gloom? You can kind of say that. Last week we heard that Sears Canada is going bankrupt. It joins Rue21, The Limited, Wet Seal, Bebe, hhgregg, among others.

Amazon? It's business as usual. Unfortunately "business as usual" for Amazon means multiple layers of innovation.

Amazon Dash Wand

Amazon is giving away its Dash Wand with Alexa for free. How so you may ask? Prime members who spend $20 on the Dash Wand get a $20 Amazon gift card and 90 days of free AmazonFresh grocery delivery, which normally costs $15 per month.

The Dash wand allows you to order consumables easier than ever. This is an AmazonFresh play. Dash buttons are like easy ways to restock those consumables such as soap, paper towels or whatever home goods the case may be.

Dash paired with Alexa is scary good innovation. Since Amazon Echo has roughly 70% of the home speaker market; it's not just first mover advantage, it's the AI of shopping and voice commerce.

What people don't realize agility stacks, and exponential innovation is a competitive advantage that allows you to take on anybody. That's exactly what we are seeing with Amazon against the world.

Ikea and Nike now on Amazon

You can now shop for Ikea furniture on Amazon and even get Nike shoes. Ten thousand hits for Ikea items on Amazon can't be a bad thing for the new consumer.

Amazon Gets Whole Food Stores

The acquisition of Whole Foods basically makes Jeff Bezos the richest person on the planet. It also means the e-commerce Giant is hitting prime time with actual stores. There are literally hundreds of articles already on this and FYI, it's good reading!

$14 Billion is not a heck of a lot for a company like Amazon with a lot of cash on hand.

However, it's making Kroger, Walmart, Target and others more than a bit wary.

Grocery by the Numbers

In the U.S. grocery is one of the biggest industries. Since Amazon has the best competitive playbook in the world (witness E-commerce giants in India) or Amazon Echo vs. Google Home in our homes, and you know that Amazon can rise to top 3 in Grocery in just the next few years.

That's a lucrative market that will allow Amazon to do serious damage in the late 2020s and 2030s. AmazonGo technology could transform the ratio of store associates + cashiers needed in Whole Food stores to function at new levels.

The key takeaway might be that since the U.S market for food and beverage is $795 billion, it’s the single highest-occasion shopping we do as consumers. As such, Amazon is the big fish going to be the shark in the ocean where all the algae is at.

Amazon understands Scale, Logistics and Long-term Strategy

In the acquisition of Whole Foods, Amazon gets 431 stores in prime retail space in affluent areas, nationwide, for just ~ $32 million per store. The premium grocery consumer, is already Amazon's highest value customer.

Amazon has failed fast and now understand how to scale, do logistics and plan ahead decades in advance. Recent Amazon patents show that much, as if we didn't already know Amazon is a futuristic company.

Amazon is also beating technology Giants at their own game. This should not only worry retailers, grocery chains but also the best technology companies such as Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others. AWS is a model that has been shown to be transferable to other innovation verticals.

Amazon literally is the modern day marketplace, and the marketplace will swallow search and it will swallow content. Before 2030, it's rather likely Amazon will not only decimate its retail and grocery opposition, but eat a few tech companies in the process.

If all goes as planned, Amazon will become a leading video channel, advertiser and artificial intelligence company that can also build consumer tech hardware products.

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