Who are Amazon competitors? Top 10 biggest competitors of Amazon
By Sam Nguyen
Drive 20-40% of your revenue with Avada
Considered as the largest online marketplace with net sales in 2019 is over 280 billion dollars. It is regarded a giant in the world of eCommerce and hardly any marketplace can compete with it.
Are there any competitors of Amazon? What are they? And how can niche stores compete with Amazon in online business?
All will be solved in this article!
Table Content
- An introduction about Amazon
- 4 Types of Amazon Competitors
- Top 10 biggest competitors of Amazon
- How niche brands can compete against Amazon
- Concentrate on building your brand
- Pay attention to retain customers
- Focus on SEO
- Establish a list of leads’ emails
- Provide attractive discounts
- Improve user experience on your site
- Sell different products from Amazon
- Offer reasonable prices
- Try to increase conversion rates
- Offer simple return policy
- Ship products in two days
- Collaborate with other marketplaces
An introduction about Amazon
Introduced in 1994 by CEO Jeff Bezos, Amazon is a giant of the eCommerce world with net sales of $232 billion per year. According to Forbes, Amazon had surpassed Walmart in May 2019 and ranked first in the list of the world’ largest retailers.
Therefore, Amazon is the competitor of any eCommerce merchants worldwide, whatever products they sell. People can find everything they need on Amazon, from small things like masks, spoons to laptops, air conditioners, and even a pre-built tiny home is also sold on Amazon.
According to Statista, Amazon accounts for 47 percent of the eCommerce market share of the United States in 2020. And it is also predicted that this will increase to 50% in 2021.
From these figures, it can be concluded that there is no sign of slowing down in Amazon’s development; it will continue to grow and be the biggest competitor of eCommerce merchants.
However, that doesn’t mean that no one can compete and surpass Amazon. In the world of technology, Amazon also has its competitor with the same size: They are Netflix, the competitor of Amazon Prime Video in media, Google Home versus Alexa - the virtual assistant of Amazon, or Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, which compete with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and offer AWS to Azure Migration Services. Besides, there also exist multiple competitors of Amazon in the B2B and B2C business.
So, what are they? And how can people divide them into different categories? Let’s move on to the next sections!
4 Types of Amazon Competitors
In general, the competitors of Amazon can be put into 4 groups which are Online Marketplace, Physical Stores, Social Media Marketplace, and Niche eCommerce stores
Online Marketplace
As we know, online marketplaces are the website that sellers upload the products they want to sell online and people who want this product can place an order online and it will be shipped to their address. Some examples of online marketplaces are eBay, Alibaba, etc.
Statista stated that online marketplace is also the channel accounting for the largest part in the distribution of online purchase worldwide in July, 2019, It is 47 percent. Furthermore, online marketplaces are wonderful places for sellers who don’t want to or don’t have enough financial resources to generate a platform for themselves. Buyers, who love purchasing repeatedly and remove the previous purchase from retailers and brands, tend to consider online marketplaces as the top priority when shopping online.
In 2019, people spent $1.97 billion on the top 100 online marketplaces which accounted for 57% of the global online retail sales, according to Digital Commerce 360. Perhaps, many of us only heard about some popular platforms like Amazon, Alibaba, Walmart, eBay, Etsy but there still exist hundreds of online marketplaces besides these platforms that may be strange to us. For instance, Zalando in the field of fashion or AirBnb where people can rent a house when travelling.
Physical Stores
$25 trillion is the value of the world’s eCommerce industry that reached in 2019. And Amazon is the main part that contributes to this development, although there are over 20 million virtual stores around the world.
Nevertheless, in online retail, the income doesn’t concentrate on some large brands but disperse. And, the majority of online retail competitors of Amazon are physical stores. It is also their advantage over Amazon.
Competitors in this term can be named Walmart. Even though in the online market, Amazon may surpass Walmart, the entire revenue of Walmart in 2019 is $532 billion as twice as the one of Amazon in the same year. Another competitor is Apple whose sales net in 2019 is more than 260 billion. Its success came mostly from its brick and mortar stores.
Social Media Marketplace
The social media marketplace can be considered the intersection point of eCommerce and social media, which is made to help shoppers have a seamless experience when shopping online.
Approximately 9 in every 10 people agree that social media plays a vital role in their shopping decision. It is also the reason why the social media marketplace has developed as recently.
Due to the world’s pressure, multiple social media platforms have changed themselves to adjust to the world’s development—Facebook, Pinterest, or Instagram already jump this field.
2019 is the first time that Facebook officially regards Amazon as a competitor, which marks their movement to the social media marketplace, a new era in the virtual business world. We have witnessed the appearance of the feature allowing users to shop directly in the social media platform in numerous popular platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and so on. This, hence, changes the eCommerce market significantly.
Niche eCommerce stores
To exist in this competitive world, Niche stores successfully take advantage of the markets that people don’t care about or explore. By selling only certain items and services, niche stores can develop well without having to compete fiercely with various companies in the oversaturated market.
Instead, their concentration is to build customer loyalty, which helps them maintain their revenue. Also, they believe that their customers would like to do business with a store specified in the field of product rather than the one selling hundreds of products and do not focus on anything.
Top 10 biggest competitors of Amazon
As mentioned above, all the eCommerce stores in the world have to compete with Amazon, so it is impossible to calculate Amazon’s competitors worldwide. The following list is the 10 largest competitors of Amazon that we would like to introduce to you.
Alibaba
Founded in 1999 in China, Alibaba is an online marketplace for wholesalers. After 21 years of development, it has now been one of the largest eCommerce companies worldwide. People from every corner of the world can buy products from Alibaba. In this top marketplace, merchants can affect the Internet used to chat and negotiate with their buyers and users.
Similar to Amazon, a variety of products are sold on Alibaba such as home decor, clothing, machinery, electronics, and more. People can assess this site from anywhere and at any time when the internet is available. More than that, it also makes use of such technologies like computing and digital media, which is the reason why Alibaba is regarded as the competitor of Amazon.
Walmart
Owning both online and offline stores, there is no reason to put Walmart out of the list of Amazon’s competitors. Similar to physical stores, Walmart.com is the place where people can find items with high quality. Moreover, it also offers customers plenty of user-friendly services with reasonable prices.
Founded in 2000 with the headquarters placed in San Francisco, Walmart is a part of Walmart Inc. This online marketplace offers people dozens of products such as clothing, home improvement, toys, baby, garden, food, and more. They aim to bring their customer’s unique ways when shopping online.
With the strength in offline and online commerce, Walmart creates multiple unique programs to attract its customers. One of them is the gift card. Walmart gives buyers many kinds of gift cards that can be redeemed at one of their 11,718 physical stores across 28 countries and these gift cards are under the control of the online Walmart store.
Netflix
Netflix which is an entertainment company is considered the competitor of Amazon in terms of media. With the headquarters in California, the United States, Netflix is one of the largest companies offering entertainment services for people worldwide. When thinking about Netflix, people often think about a website that provides users with a plethora of streaming videos and virtual video-on-demand.
At the end of 2019, the number of subscribers on Netflix is more than 167 million across 190 countries with over 61 members from America and over 100 million people from other countries of the globe .
Once signing up, members on Netflix are able to watch videos and films there as much as possible. They are also given the ability to watch the video more conveniently like in other video platforms such as Amazon Prime Video or Youtube which are pausing, playing, resuming, and so on.
JD
JD, which is also known as Jingdong or 360buy, is a Chinese marketplace. It was introduced in 1998 and headquartered in Beijing, China. At first, this marketplace was known for its business-to-customer (B2C) operations and only became famous among customers from 2004. Apart from the web jd.com, this platform owns a website which is joybuy.com and this site is the official one.
In JD, you can easily find any products of China with affordable prices. It also enables you to choose the products you like, make a purchase and then wait for the products which then will be shipped to the buyer’s address.
JD was visible in NASDAQ, a stock market in China. This platform is known as developing flawless platforms and suitable services for both customers and partners.
Priceline
Another top company in the eCommerce industry we would like to introduce to you is Priceline Headquartered in Connecticut, Priceline is created to help people when they are travelling. Via this site, you can buy many necessary things for your journey like airline tickets, hotel bookings, car rentals , cruise rentals, etc.
Moreover, buyers are able to book a package on Priceline which consists of booking two or three things among hotels, flights, and cars. When they do that, they will receive the coupons for discounting products or any special deals given by Priceline.
To encourage people to book more, this platform also offers a bonus point which is given to people in the form of rewards. If it is the first time you book on Priceline, you will be provided with a bonus points for this program.
Not only providing service booking for the journey online, but Priceline also sells products recently. There are approximately 10,000 items from multiple categories which ranges from cosmetics, skincare to baby products.
eBay
Like Amazon, eBay is a popular company in the eCommerce industry. This marketplace is the product of the namesake company which is also a multinational corporation. In fact, eBay is famous for being a website friendly to users and concentrates primarily on C2C (customer-to-customer) and B2C (business-to-customer) eCommerce.
In simple words, eBay is an online marketplace that allows sellers to upload and sell their goods as well as buyers to purchase the merchandise they like. In eBay, you are given the opportunity to access an enormous amount of items belonging to numerous categories such as fashion, home and garden, furniture, electronics, health & beauty, and more.
Also known as the biggest shopping mall on the Internet of the world, eBay deserves to be a strong competitor of Amazon.
Flipkart
Launched in 2007, Flipkart , which is the largest online store selling such items as apparels, furniture, beauty care, etc. is based on Bangalore.
There are over 100 million buyers and 100 thousands sellers signing up on Flipkart so that people can find many things here. It also enables buyers to make a purchase for the product they want via two ways: from the site or the app.
With the customer service available in 24 hours per day and seven days per week, Flipkart will satisfy the strictest customers. In addition, it also provides them with the seamless shopping experience from the first steps like choosing the items to the last one: tracking the order and shipping status of the transaction and even returning products.
Home Depot
Home Depot, or The Home Depot, Inc., is considered the biggest company retailing products in the category of home improvement in the United States. In this platform, over 35,000 products, services, and tools related to construction can be found in a couple of seconds. Spreading across nearly 2,300 places all over the world, this marketplace is proud of providing customers with their respect and products, services with high quality.
Even though the products sold on Home Depot are high quality, the price of major products there is feasible, allowing everyone to have a chance to experience them. From the founding year, which is 1978, until now, Home Depot changes around 37,000 homes.
Costco
Regarded a large competitor of Amazon, Costco is a product of Costco Wholesale Corporation. With over 780 membership warehouses stores , Costco is exactly the biggest wholesale club operator in the United States.
This store’s target is to offer customers the products of high quality but cheap so that customers will receive more benefit from their products. In the world, there are over 100 places that are operating Costco, which offers people a wide array of products from various categories like electronics, home appliances, books, gifts, clothing, office products, furniture, and more.
Besides, it also allows users to access the department or membership created carefully to live up to customer expectations.
Kroger
The kind of products that Kroger concentrates on is food. It has approximately 2,782 grocery stores in 35 states of the United States. Besides food, Kroger also sells jewelry, pharmacy, etc. It owns two jewelry stores: Fred Meyer Jewellers and Littman Jewellers and has a connection with nearly 274 stores in the country.
Kroger’s strategy is to have warehouses with more cost-effective prices and better supermarkets and multi-department stores. Due to its operation, Kroger is regarded as an economical three-tier distribution system.
How niche brands can compete against Amazon
Niche brands don’t have as much money as Walmart, eBay, or Alibaba to compete with Amazon. Likewise, they cannot or don’t need the revenue of 1 billion dollar per year to go up against Amazon. So, what do they do to succeed in business and now are considered competitors of Amazon?
These 12 tips below will help you answer your question!
Concentrate on building your brand
Your brand is very important so the first thing you need to do is build a brand that can be recognized easily and have a certain status in customers’ minds. When they are loyal to your brand, they will be willing to buy it rather than other similar products with lower prices.
Brand is also the reason why with the same ingredients and method but Starbucks can sell their coffee for 5 dollar but other brands cannot or people are willing to spend $500 on purchasing a T-shirt while there are plenty of similar products in the market with much lower price.
Although every product sold on Amazon has their own brand, people never care about it when placing an order on Amazon. Therefore, by building your own brand, you will make your products stand out among various products available on Amazon.
Pay attention to retain customers
Many people think that the best way to boost profit is to look for as many new customers as possible. Unfortunately, this thought is a terrible misunderstanding. Having more new customers is crucial but retaining existing customers is even more crucial so you should not neglect your purchased customers.
In fact, existing customers are the ones that already purchase a product or service from your store and are familiar with your brand. Hence, they will be more likely to buy another product from your store again. And the money used to encourage existing customers to buy again is much cheaper than the one for new customers since you have to spend money on advertising to help them know who you are, what you sell, and more.
According to Invespcro, the rate that an existing customer comes back to buy your products is 70 percent while the ratio that a product is sold for a new one is just 5.
Besides, repeat customers tend to spend more money on buying the store they have already bought so that you will sell more products by focusing on existing ones. Invespcro also stated that 50 percent of existing customers are comfortable with trying a new product from the store they are familiar with and the money they spend on your store will increase by 31%.
This program is also conducted in Amazon: It introduces to buyers the Prime memberships.
Focus on SEO
eCommerce SEO is the element that merchants, particularly the one of B2B business need to focus on today’s life. They need to focus on site architecture, user experience, blogs, category descriptions, product descriptions, keyword research, and link building to implement SEO strategies effectively.
If you are excellent at SEO, your product will rank high in SERPs and appear in the first page whenever people search relevant keywords in your categories on Google. This event has a great impact on deciding whether a person buys your product or not. Forbes found out that 71 percent of click is done on the first page, so if your products are put on this page, the likelihood of sales conversion will increase significantly.
If you pay no attention to organic search traffic, it means you depend completely on being directly accessed by your customers and ignore the influence of search engines. But this only works with people familiar with your brand, so how about the new one? How can you persuade them to buy your products?
It is said that the search engine is the start of over 90 percent of virtual shopping experience. So, it is evitable that SEO is the must care element when you do business online; your site must appear in the organic search result.
Establish a list of leads’ emails
Email marketing is the best way to communicate with your customers. Via the email, you can introduce to your customer multiple special programs or any new arrivals which can attract them to visit your site and place an order. Since you think about your brand all day but your customers don’t, so reminding them through email is a pretty ideal way.
There are two common ways that people often make use to build email lists.
The first way is to require your buyers to give email for the checkout process so that they don’t have to hesitate and think about the problem of participating or most. Their emails will receive the receipt, emails for confirming orders or update the customers with the latest news about shipping.
Secondly, sellers can give your subscribers a small incentive when they take part in the email lists. For example, people will receive a 20% discount coupon if they are the new ones. Otherwise, if they invite their friend to provide emails, they will receive a discount coupon on your store. With these coupons, people will be eager to make a purchase, and you, then, can increase the sales for your store.
Provide attractive discounts
To increase sales, sellers often make buyers feel dissatisfied after buying their products from their website. However, this is not a good idea. Anyone among us all wants to have a good deal when buying if the order on your site leaves a bad impression. They will not be likely to return to purchase in your store another time.
This is also the strategy that Amazon applies to their website. Therefore, to succeed in online business and become Amazon’s competitor, it is necessary that you provide attractive discounts for buyers to your website. This will make them feel they are participating in a good deal and decide to purchase faster.
Improve user experience on your site
Amazon is a professional in this field. It takes care of your site’s user experience by giving them multiple options like a website, an app on mobile devices, and the checkout process with one click. All these are the factors that contribute to the success of Amazon.
As a result, it is advisable to improve the user experience on your website first to be able to compete with Amazon. The two important requirements is that the steps in your site need to be done simply and load rapidly. If the result they want does not appear after a or two clicks, buyers often feel annoyed and tend to move to another online marketplace.
Consequently, pay attention to the feelings of your buyers and modify your web to suit with it and you will receive surprising results.
It is revealed that 0.5 seconds is the average time a person has a first impression on a website, 38 percent of people asked confirm that they will stop buying on the site with no catchy design. Additionally, the ratio of people who agree that they will never purchase on a website that they have already had bad experience with is 88%.
So, try your best to make your site as simple and beautiful as possible.
Sell different products from Amazon
This is one of the first things you have to remember when selling a product on the Internet. As we can see, people can find anything on Amazon, so you need to try your best to find one that is unavailable on Amazon. This will help you a lot, especially when you don’t have a huge source of finance like Amazon.
You can create your own products to sell on your website or look for the strange item. By doing that, you will create your own market or the niche one that helps you avoid directly competing with Amazon.
Offer reasonable prices
To compete with Amazon, multiple online retailers choose to sacrifice their profit margins but it is a silly idea. Since when comparing the price, buyers will obviously select them but this campaign cannot last for long, minimizing the profit margins can lead your company to the edge of bankruptcy.
Amazon can keep their products’ prices low due to the enormous number of items sold on its platform. But if you are a small business, keeping the price at the same level seems to be impossible.
Instead, the advice for you is to offer a practical profit margin and exploit numerous events and programs to reach these margins such as promotions, discounts, or flash sales, etc.
Try to increase conversion rates
The traffic driven to your site will be useless if there is no conversion made. Thus, it can be understood that the most important factor on e Commerce is not the traffic, but the conversion.
In fact the conversion rate on Amazon Prime is around 74%, such a wonderful rate. Perhaps it is difficult for you to get this rate but you can use the conversion funnel of Amazon as a reference but put the lower goal. It can be 5 percent, 10 percent or double the recent conversion rates.
To reach this goal, you can take advantage of many ways, like concentrating on funnels and supporting our customers during the checkout process. Streamlining the process is another way to allow buyers to complete their checkout process in a couple of seconds.
Offer simple return policy
Noone wants the face to return but it is a part of business, so instead of avoiding it, merchants need to encounter it in the smartest way by offering buyers simple ways to return products.
This may sound strange but in some cases, it is the difference between a successful conversion and the failed one.
It is demonstrated that the amount of people who check the return policy of the site they want to buy in advance is 66 percent and 88% said that they will not place an order on the site that has a complex return policy.
Due to some reasons, buyers can return your products, or want to replace the one they receive with another. This, obviously, makes both you and your customers feel unsatisfied. So, don’t make the situation worse by forcing them to pay a certain amount of money for the returns. This will make your buyers say goodbye with you.
Over 41 percent of buyers agree that they want to purchase items on the shop offering the return policy with no fee. Hence, you should make your free return shipping label outstanding on your package. This will help you remove the likelihood of losing your customers just because of a return.
Ship products in two days
It takes only two days to ship the products to the customer’s address on Amazon, and this period of time has become the standard shipping time in the buyers’ minds. Consequently, you need to offer the shipping service at the same time or offer free shipment.
18 percent of buyers said that the slow shipping time is why they abandon the checkout of their orders. Moreover, 93 % of people tend to buy more regularly if it costs no fee for the shipment. You don’t need to worry about the cost since you can make up for the items’ base price.
To beat Amazon, you need to offer a free and fast shipping service.
Collaborate with other marketplaces
Rather than selling products only in your eCommerce store, it is a good idea to collaborate with other marketplaces and sell your products there. You can consider some online marketplaces such as Etsy, Touch of modern, Fancy, or Wayfair.
By selling you products on the marketplaces that focus on specific categories, your products will become more familiar to them and increase sales more simply.
Final Thoughts
Overall, Amazon is a giant in the eCommerce industry; it is a strong competitor that not many online marketplaces can compete with. But it doesn’t mean no marketplace can go against them, and the top 10 online marketplaces are the typical example of Amazon’s competitors. You can also exploit these 12 tips above to create a suitable campaign to compete with Amazon and succeed in your business.
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