Can Amazon Ever Compete On Quality?
Top-drawer, lovely, unique, stunning — even genuine — don’t seem like the adjectives that push shoppers to Amazon to buy something. “Inexpensive” and “fast” almost certainly are, though, and that’s been enough to shake up the retail industry for the past two decades. The Amazon flywheel — the business strategy that helped the company grow from an online bookseller in 1994 to “the everything store” today — is fueled by diligently keeping a three-pronged promise to its customers, at least those who are Prime members. The company offers a trifecta of price, selection and convenience to entice shoppers. That has allowed it to capture, by some estimates, nearly half of all online sales in the U.S. But, where exactly does “quality” fit into Amazon’s value proposition? Read more at Retail Dive.
The easy answer is, “Why should Amazon even try so long as consumers do not care?”. The average shopper, at least in the US, seems very content to purchase the cheapest items, regardless of quality, and this does not seem to be abating.