But before you raise that white flag, consider this: Amazon sells everything. While that may seem like an advantage, it also leaves plenty of space for eCommerce vendors with expertise knowledge, a unique angle, and a willingness to provide highly focused customer service. The answer to the question of competition is in all actuality a resounding yes -- just not on price.
So, how can you use your unique angle to take on the Everything Store? Let's take a look.
1. Make Your Expertise Known
If you're not Amazon, Wal-Mart or Target, chances are you've got a unique product or service focus. In fact, when customers believe in their niche eCommerce gurus, they have been known to pay as much as twice as much on specialized sites as they would have on Amazon. Fortunately, with a host of powerful digital tools at your disposal, there are plenty of ways to let customers know all about your expertise.
For one, start by ensuring your product pages are chock full of juicy information. Detailed specs are a must, as are professionally shot product photos that capture every angle in the best light. Videos can also be enormously helpful, and they're also a great way to market as you can host them on YouTube for general search and consumption. Videos can range from sizing tips to product demos that take the potential buyer step by step through the experience of using your product. Mix in a few neat tricks for advanced users, and you'll really impress your potential customers.
Just as crucial in establishing expertise is running a highly curated and dynamic blog or resource center, where everyone from industry experts to workers on the assembly line can weigh in with guest posts and top tips. The goal of such content should be to provide very rich and meaty resources that give your highly specific audience insight into the many issues that concern them most, whether that's how to use the crampon you sell to climb Mt. Everest or crafting tips for kids to match the art supplies displayed in your store.
Of course, Amazon tries to provide similar resources, but with so many products in the store, it's really up to each third party seller to do so, and the results vary. That leaves a lot of space for you to wriggle in and go above and beyond in establishing your expertise.
2. Use Your Targeted Focus to Your Marketing Advantage
That targeted focus is also a key marketing advantage, especially if you've taken the time to get to know who your audience is, what they need most, how they like to connect with their favorite brands and what kind of voicing they respond to. This is something an “everything seller” like Amazon just can't do, as they can't (and don't want to) control when or how their third party sellers with run their campaign, nor can they narrow their audience appeals without alienating an even larger part of their audience.
Not surprisingly, so much of this hyper-targeted marketing will happen on social media, where you can monitor your customers' feeds for topics that interest them, respond directly to mentions of your products, and run social contests, like competing to write the best funny caption or submitting photos of pets wearing your products. (Imagine Amazon doing such a thing! It'd be a logistical nightmare to manage).
Even off of social media, there are plenty of ways to get hyper-focused in your marketing campaigns. One classic example if ModCloth's Be the Buyer campaign, which invites customers to vote on products they'd like to see stocked in the store. Not only does this save the company from some guesswork but it also engages their highly interested customers to help make the brand to which they are so loyal.
3. Offer a Different Business Model
Alternatively, some eCommerce sites go so far as to design their entire sales strategy in a manner that's entirely counter to that of Amazon. The clearest examples of this are flash sales sites like Daily Steals, which sells products through daily deals that feature products available at significantly reduced prices, rather than making them available at all times. Other companies like Birchbox work on a subscription model, with customers receiving beauty products once a month or more. While subscriptions are certainly an option for some Amazon products, this kind of specialization imbues Birchbox with an air of expertise and helpfulness that's unavailable elsewhere. The unique nature of both sales approaches is fun for consumers, who search for deals or sign up for subscriptions so that they can shop in a way that differs from their day to day.
4. Sell Your Own Products
While Amazon does sell a few of its own products, it is known mostly as a reseller. In that way, you can really stand out by designing your own unique products that narrow in on a niche and communicate your own funky aesthetic. A great example of this is the site Kidrobot.com, which sells limited edition pop culture toys. While the faces of each toy might be familiar, the quality and approach to design is unique, as is the mysterious buying experience (you don't necessarily know which toy in a category you're going to get until the product arrives). Every aspect of the buying process is unique, from the site itself down to the products on sale, so that customers feel like they're navigating their own adventure. Amazon is a non-entity here, because they simply don't carry what Kidrobot makes.
5. Reward and Support Customers
Amazon does many things right, but chief among them is customer service. Whether a customer simply wants to make a return or they've got a complaint that needs a human response, Amazon makes customer service a priority, even if that means taking a loss on an item with something like free shipping. And with so much big data at their fingertips, they tend to know what a customer is calling about ahead of time, meaning their customer service is personalized from the get go.
While that may be difficult to beat, you can certainly keep up. Make sure you've got many ways to get in touch with you, whether through social media or through a hotline that's manned by actual human beings. If you can't afford free shipping, at least pay for return postage so customers don’t have to pay a cent for something they don't wind up wanting or needing.
In addition to supporting customers in this way, it's also a smart idea to reward your most loyal customers so that they keep coming back. A loyalty program is a great way to do this, whether this means first notification on the release of new products for VIP members or coupons for a certain number of purchases. Not only will loyalty programs engender good will, but they will also motivate customers to continue buying with you even when Amazon offers a better price.
6. Make Sure Your Site is in Order
Hands down, the best thing you can do to compete with Amazon is to ensure your website makes it as easy and as enticing to order as it is with your competitor. From responsive design that works on every platform to a shopping cart and checkout procedure that requires as little effort as possible to algorithms that suggest related items before checkout, browsing and buying on your site should be quick and painless.
This, however, can be difficult and costly to design on your own, so it makes sense to work through a third party eCommerce platform. And you know who makes one? Yep -- Amazon Webstore. I know, I know, that's the company we've been competing with, but here's the thing: Amazon Marketplace actually promotes their own eCommerce vendors. That's how they work! But whether you use Marketplace or not, Webstore provides a simple way to benefit from all of the same Amazon platform tools, like shopping carts and payments. You'll still get to customize the design and can work entirely independently, but with all of the same functionality. So in the end, the best way to compete with Amazon is really to use... Amazon.
The Takeaway
As a marketplace, Amazon is an intimidating competitor for small eCommerce site, but there's no reason it should squeeze everybody else out. With your hyper-focus, your site can be more agile and responsive to customer needs, more targeted in your marketing efforts, and more unique all throughout. When you think about it, those are some pretty lofty advantages.
Author Bio
Rob Toledo is a Seattleite who matches the usual stereotypes. Loves coffee, the rain, and prefers dogs to cats. When not rambling about marketing and web design, he can be found in the mountains either climbing or hiking
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