亚马逊时代的零售竞争之道

    我最近一直在思考亚马逊（Amazon）这家公司，部分原因是因为我近来正在读布拉德•斯隆的一本有趣的著作——《什么都卖的商店：杰夫•贝佐斯与亚马逊的时代》。

    我之前曾在一篇博文中谈到过，亚马逊是怎样通过越来越大的成本优势以及疯狂追逐最低价格（至少大部分时间是这样），从而对实体商家形成重大威胁的。（有兴趣的读者可点击此处进行延伸阅读。）同理，亚马逊对于其它电子商务公司来说也是一个重大的竞争对手。

    很多人都知道，实体店几乎已经成了网购的“样品间”。很多顾客一走进实体店就掏出智能手机，把货架上的价格与电商的价格进行对比——通常而言那家电商就是亚马逊。消费者爱比价是不争的事实，不论网上网下无不如此。而亚马逊对其它电商也是一个杀手级的竞争对手。

    亚马逊比其它电商更喜欢玩规模经济，而且它们可以利用这种实力提供极其具有杀伤力的价格和快捷便宜的快递服务。下图就是亚马逊的规模经济示意图，数据来自亚马逊。

    I've had Amazon on my mind lately, partly because I'm reading Brad Stone's interesting book, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon.

    I've described in earlier blog posts how Amazon (AMZN) is a brutal competitor for brick and mortar merchants due to their large and growing cost advantages and a maniacal commitment (at least most of the time) to having the lowest prices anywhere. (You can read more about it here.) These same drivers also make Amazon a heavyweight competitor for e-commerce companies.

    Much attention has been paid to the concept of "show-rooming" at brick and mortar stores, where customers use their smartphones to compare the cost of a product on a physical store's shelf against online competitors -- typically Amazon. But immediate cost-comparison is a fact of life, online or off. Amazon is a monster competitor to online merchants as well.

    Amazon enjoys economies of scale far beyond their online competition, and they can use that power to offer hyper-aggressive prices and fast, cheap shipping. Here is a simple illustration of their scale, using data from Internet Retailer:  

    从第二名以降，十几家规模最大的网商绑成一团，也比不上亚马逊一家的规模！由此可见亚马逊的规模优势非常巨大，而且他们还积极利用这种规模经济带来的优势进行再投资，让商品价格更低，快递服务更快、更便宜，以带动增长和进一步的规模优势。所以当我们的霍洛维茨基金考虑每一笔电商领域投资的时候，都要努力地仔细评估来自亚马逊的竞争风险。他们不是一句“重量级”就可以形容的——他们是全世界的重量级冠军。

    那么，怎样才能和亚马逊竞争呢？以下是我们在网上和网下的零售商那里观察到的一些策略。其中有些策略可以并行不悖，很多公司就同时采取了其中的好几种。

    Amazon is larger than the next dozen largest e-tailers -- COMBINED! Its resulting scale advantages are staggering. And they aggressively re-invest the benefits of this scale into even lower prices and faster, cheaper shipping that in turn lead to growth and further scale advantages. When we consider an e-commerce investment at a16z, we always strive to carefully evaluate the risk of competition from Amazon. They're not just a heavyweight -- they're the heavyweight champion of the world.

    So how do you compete with Amazon? Here are some strategies that we're seeing in the market from both offline and online retailers. Not all are mutually exclusive -- i.e., many companies deploy multiple strategies: