EP 019: Ecommerce is a Bear (4 strategies for competing against Amazon)

Today I'm joined by Shabbir Nooruddin of BootstrappingEcommerce.com for a discussion of Andy Dunn's article, "E-Commerce is a Bear." The basic idea behind the article is this: Big ecommerce companies like Amazon are like grizzly bears--they are the apex predators who annihilate or consume anything in their path. How can smaller ecommerce companies even begin to compete against Amazon's ferocious price competition and scale?

Andy discusses 4 strategies for competing against Amazon, so Shabbir and I decided to give a summary of those strategies while also sharing our own own thoughts, as well as giving a few real-world examples of ecommerce companies who are using these strategies. Our goal in sharing these tips and examples is to help other small, bootstrapped ecommerce ventures like ours and yours better position ourselves to compete in this tough playing field.

To hear the episode, click play below or download in iTunes.

Links referenced during the show:

BootstrappingEcommerce.com - Shabbir's blog

FishFinderSource.com - Shabbir's ecommerce store

SurvivalKnifeExperts.com - My ecommerce store

E-Commerce is a Bear, by Andy Dunn

Andrew Youderian's blog post about selling one of his ecommerce stores, TrollingMotors.net

Woot.com - A site with a "flash sale" model

I mentioned a discussion between Terry Lin and Andrew Youderian about "ambiguously priced products." In our discussion, I mistakenly said that Terry Lin mentioned this on his own podcast, Build My Online Store, but he actually said this on a recent episode of Andrew Youderian's eCommerceFuel podcast. Here is a link to that episode (conversation about product value/pricing starts at about 14:30).

AccessoryConcierge.com - A company that started off doing flash sales on Facebook, build a following of thousands of people, then used that momentum to launch an ecommerce store with a more traditional model.

ManCrates.com

ManPacks.com

RightChannelRadios.com - Another one of Andrew Youderian's ecommerce stores that provides an example of the second strategy discussed on the show (proprietary selection).

JustFab, Shoedazzle, and TrunkClub.com - Ecommerce businesses that use the third strategy we discuss on the show (proprietary experience).

Quote of the week: