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Remember when everyone was calling Amazon the Walmart of the Web? That was so 1990s. But…after reading Marketing Wonk’s interesting take on this article in Internet News, Walmart certainly came to mind, and not because they both sell a lot of shit. The commentary:
It might have taken warehouse store price pressure 300 years to develop and begin to put out of business Main Street bricks and mortar stores, but on the Internet, Jeff Bezos hopes the process will take merely a few years. In comments to financial analysts, Amazon.com CEO Bezos said the corporate strategy will remain to lower prices – even at the expense of gross margins – in order to gain share, prevent competition and create more power to put pressure on suppliers.
What’s interesting to me about Wal-Mart is that they’ve build their brand on a flat promise of “cutting prices”, and their contracts reflect that – increasing discount percentages year after year. But it seems to me that you can only cut prices so far.
Currently, Wal-Mart accounts for like 10 percent of US imports from China. Where do you go when China is too expensive?