Lesson from Amazon: Never stop seeking opportunities to disrupt

Love it or hate it, you can’t ignore Amazon!

Love it or hate it, Amazon is a company which you just can’t afford to ignore. From its simple beginning of selling books online in 1994, to today’s global domination of online product sales, and massive compute capacity supporting its data centre web services offer, the story of Amazon is truly compelling. Never more so than if you are an entrepreneur and owner, or the manager of a product distribution business.

There are many lessons that can be learned from Amazon’s success. Sure, it receives its share of negative MSM (Main Stream Media) coverage and social comment, but this reflects the level of success which the company enjoys.

It might be easy when you happen to have got in on the ground floor and are now generating a net income of over $2bn and have assets of more than $83bn with which to support endless market research, invest heavily in innovation and attract top talent. Perhaps it is harder when you have more limited resources at your disposal?

What can we learn from Amazon?

However, just because you run a smaller operation, it doesn’t mean you can’t learn from Amazon’s success and translate the lessons to make your multichannel distribution business more prosperous.

Among the 25 or so main products and services of Amazon.com listed by Wikipedia many are familiar, some because they have attracted a lot of attention. All of the list below is prefixed with ‘Amazon’…

• Prime – same day/next day delivery
• Video – video on demand
• Fresh – groceries and perishable produce
• Local – daily deals limited by geography
• Platinum MasterCard – credit card facility
• Vouchers – gifts and prizes
• Drive – online cloud data storage service
• Studios – programming and original video content

If Amazon didn’t invent Black Friday, who did? Is the prospect of drone deliveries really likely, or is it just pie carrying robots in the sky?

We could go on, but you get the picture. So, what can we make of it all and learn?

• First and foremost, Amazon is a technology company, and it goes without saying that its outstanding tech is absolutely pivotal to its success.
• Secondly, Amazon is absolutely relentless in the way it explores for new opportunities, and being disruptive clearly plays a key part in its strategy.
• Thirdly, Amazon has no respect for the status quo; if you are an established business, especially one that is complacent, it is likely to consider muscling in on your action.

Exploit opportunities and disrupt markets with BlueBridge One

If you want to disrupt the marketplaces in which you compete or exploit new markets and opportunities like Amazon, have you got the right technology tools?

BlueBridge One is a NetSuite 5-Star Award winning system integrator that specialises in partnering with product distribution businesses. Many distribution businesses with which we work find they are better able to disrupt markets and exploit opportunities once they have the right technology tools at their disposal.

To see how our cloud ERP solutions can help you apply the lesson of Amazon to your multichannel product distribution business, simply get in touch today.