Speed, Mobility and Online Sales

I read an article in the WSJ (Wall Street Journal) today titled, Big-Box Stores Wrestle E-Commerce Gorilla.  Here is an interesting excerpt, "Amazon sells many of the same products as big-box stores but can undercut them on prices due to lower overhead.  It also uses computer algorithms to adjust prices in real time.  Traditional retailers often can't move as rapidly because online prices must match those in stores."  I would like to also point out that an increasing amount of Amazon's sales are coming from mobile devices.  That means Amazon stands to benefit from the show-rooming trend where customers search online for deals while in big-box stores.

Note the mention of "real-time" and "rapidly" in the excerpt.  Amazon is beating big-box retailers on speed, real-time analytics, business strategies and dynamic responses.  Yesterday, I wrote an article titled, Time-Space Compression and Enterprise Mobility.  In this article I discussed dromology, the science of speed, and chronostrategies, time based strategies.  Amazon is using dromology and chronostrategies to achieve a real competitive advantage.

The technology platform that Amazon uses was not mentioned in the article.  It was their business model and business strategies that were the focus.  Amazon's technology platform, however, enables Amazon to implement a business model, with a speed and expense advantage, that provides it with a competitive advantage.

I am going to hammer on this drum for a few days.  Technology supports Amazon's online, speed and low-cost business model.  The strategy, however, is not the technology but the business model supported by a speed and time advantage.

Enterprise mobility is a technology that should support your business strategy.  Is your strategy based on accomplishing speed, time, visibility and analytics advantages or a unique business model?  If so, enterprise mobility has the potential of making that possible.

The task of developing an enterprise-wide mobile strategy is always identified as one of the biggest challenges around mobility.  The reason, I believe, is that the business must recognize the potential impact of mobility, and then develop a business model that will take advantage of it.  How can the IT department develop an enterprise-wide mobility strategy without first having the business strategy and business model defined for the IT organization to support?

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Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for SMAC, Cognizant

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Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and SMAC analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos Announces $1 Billion in Mobile Sales

Jeff Bezos, Amazon's CEO announced this week that they are seeing rapid growth in Kindle, Amazon web services, third-party sales and retail.  He added, "In the last 12 months, customers around the world have ordered more than $1 billion of products from Amazon using a mobile device."

This is a very interesting report by Bezos on mobile sales numbers.  I believe it!  My wife is regularly using the Amazon iPhone application to order books and other essentials.  You can find a book on a store shelf, reach for your iPhone and enter the ISBN number.  You can immediately see the cost for a new and used version of the book on Amazon.  With one click shopping the book is on its way, and since we subscribe to the free shipping program at Amazon, even the delivery is free.

This process must frustrate bookstores or maybe not.  I guess any used book store can choose to sell books on Amazon -  they could be the one making money from the Amazon iPhone application.

I wonder how Amazon's mobile applications change the way a used bookstore operates?  I saw an example of some changes that I suspect have come about because of Amazon and mobile applications.  I was recently in the Powell's bookstore in Portland, Oregon.  As I was browsing the many rooms and floors of books (the store is enormous and a favorite destination of ours), I noticed that Powell's had covered all of the original ISBN numbers and barcodes on the books with a proprietary Powell's sticker and barcode.  Why would they do that?  It makes it far more difficult to look up the book on an Amazon iPhone application or scan the barcode with your iPhone RedLaser application.

Very interesting indeed!

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Kevin Benedict, SAP Mentor, SAP Top Contributor, Mobile and M2M Industry Analyst
CEO/Principal Consultant, Netcentric Strategies LLC
Phone +1 208-991-4410
Full Disclosure: I am an independent mobility consultant, mobility analyst, writer and Web 2.0 marketing professional. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.