Archives for category: Amazon

VUI, The Next Frontier? Alexa, open What Occurred First

October 30, 2019 //

How often do you use Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, or Siri? In our house, we converse with Alexa multiple times a day for music and speaking to Alexa has become quite natural. We do not yet utilize Alexa in other day to day applications yes, but it feels like, over time voice will become the natural interface for many applications. The Graphical User Interface is the way everyone has interacted with computers for the last forty years and still likely controls 99% of the market versus only a minimal amount for the Voice User Interface. However, it seems pretty obvious that VUI share will grow at the expense of GUI in the near, as well as further out, future. Often the best way to learn is by doing, therefore in my quest for continuous learning, I set out to create an Alexa Skill (app).

My first Alexa skill is What Occurred First, a simple, challenging app testing your knowledge of history, in a fun, slightly addictive manner. Alexa asks questions such as, What Occurred First, Aaron Burr fatally wounded Alexander Hamilton in a duel or The Louisiana Purchased was signed? The US Constitution was written in Philadelphia or The French Revolution? What Occurred First, the Pony Express began or the New York Times was founded? The answers may surprise you. How many can you get correct in a row?

I enjoyed creating the game and would love to hear comments. To check out What Occurred First, go to Amazon, and type in ‘What Occurred First Alexa’, click ‘Enable’, then ask “Alexa open What Occurred First” or use the following link: https://amzn.to/2JcO635 then click ‘Enable’ and ask “Alexa open What Occurred First”.

#alexaskill #history #americanhistory #continuouslearning

Categories Amazon, Continuous Learning, Informative Ramblings, Special Purpose Project, Uncategorized

Amazon’s Annual Shareholder Letter is a Must Read!

April 11, 2019 //

The Amazon annual shareholder letter by Jeff Bezos is always full of fascinating information and perspective, especially the views on risk/reward experiments. What Amazon has accomplished (and continues to accomplish) is mind-blowing. The letter is inspiring and a must read! A few snippets are below:

Fulfillment by Amazon and Amazon Prime Membership:

With the success of these two programs now so well established, it’s difficult for most people to fully appreciate today just how radical those two offerings were at the time we launched them. We invested in both of these programs at significant financial risk and after much internal debate. We had to continue investing significantly over time as we experimented with different ideas and iterations. We could not foresee with certainty what those programs would eventually look like, let alone whether they would succeed, but they were pushed forward with intuition and heart, and nourished with optimism.

Non-linear success:

A builder’s mentality helps us approach big, hard-to-solve opportunities with a humble conviction that success can come through iteration: invent, launch, reinvent, relaunch, start over, rinse, repeat, again and again. They know the path to success is anything but straight.

Sometimes (often actually) in business, you do know where you’re going, and when you do, you can be efficient. Put in place a plan and execute. In contrast, wandering in business is not efficient … but it’s also not random. It’s guided – by hunch, gut, intuition, curiosity, and powered by a deep conviction that the prize for customers is big enough that it’s worth being a little messy and tangential to find our way there. Wandering is an essential counter-balance to efficiency. You need to employ both. The outsized discoveries – the “non-linear” ones – are highly likely to require wandering.

Failure:

As a company grows, everything needs to scale, including the size of your failed experiments. If the size of your failures isn’t growing, you’re not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle. Amazon will be experimenting at the right scale for a company of our size if we occasionally have multibillion-dollar failures.

Amazon Echo:

No customer was asking for Echo. This was definitely us wandering. Market research doesn’t help. If you had gone to a customer in 2013 and said “Would you like a black, always-on cylinder in your kitchen about the size of a Pringles can that you can talk to and ask questions, that also turns on your lights and plays music?” I guarantee you they’d have looked at you strangely and said “No, thank you.” Since that first-generation Echo, customers have purchased more than 100 million Alexa-enabled devices.

In 2018, Third-party sales were $160 billion; First party sales were $117 billion. Although Mr. Bezos states that “Third-party sellers are kicking our first party butt. Badly” as compound growth rates are 52% vs 25%. This is simply an attempt to underplay Amazon’s dominance since the growth rate differential is directly attributable to the small third-party denominator in 1999 of .1 billion. Today, as 50% of all online sales occur through the Amazon platform, Amazon’s success is clear.

#Amazon #Risk/Reward #Non-linearSuccess

Categories Amazon, Informative Ramblings, Uncategorized

The Amazon Squeeze

July 14, 2018 //

Amazon has been a fantastic deflationary source for consumers, however it is also constantly squeezing seller margins. Fees, as a percentage of Gross Selling Price, have increased every year since 2009. In 2009, Amazon fees totaled less than 20% of the gross selling price for most third-party sellers. Now, nearly 10 years later, Amazon fees have risen to nearly 35%. Since most third-party sellers are unable to increase prices to offset the majority of these fees, margins are constantly under pressure.

Sellers can combat some of the increasing Amazon fees by more effectively managing their inventory to reduce monthly and long-term storage. Sellers can also redesign certain products to reduce weight and optimize shipping expenses. However, sellers ultimately have no choice, but to accept the Amazon fee increases. The margin squeeze has caused valuation multiples of Amazon only businesses to drop significantly over the last several years, especially sellers of staple white-label items.

Several years ago, sellers could offer white-label products, optimize their listings and enjoy year-over-year growth due to the increasing Amazon audience. However, Amazon is directly capturing an ever-increasing share of white-label products (from batteries and charging cables, to bedding, luggage, and recently small appliances and apparel). Amazon only had a minor share (or even zero share) of these markets a few years ago, but will control the vast majority of each within the next couple of years.

The speed of this transition is rarely talked about, but will make an amazing case-study in the future, as Amazon is capturing, virtually, entire category after category. Differentiated, proprietary products were beneficial for third-party sellers in the past, but now they are an absolute must to thrive on the Amazon platform.

Update: The New York Times published an detailed article today (July 23, 2018) on Amazon capturing increasing market share of white-label products. How Amazon Is Winning the Online Retail Game. Again. A few snippets below:

The results were stunning. In just a few years, AmazonBasics had grabbed nearly a third of the online market for batteries, outselling both Energizer and Duracell on its site.

The company now has roughly 100 private-label brands for sale on its huge online marketplace, of which more than five dozen have been introduced in the past year alone. But few of those are sold under the Amazon brand. Instead, they have been given a variety of anodyne, disposable names like Spotted Zebra (kids’ clothes), Good Brief (men’s underwear), Wag (dog food) and Rivet (home furnishings). Want to buy a stylish but affordable cap-sleeve dress? A flared version from Lark & Ro ($39), maybe in millennial pink, might be just what you’re looking for.

Amazon is utilizing its knowledge of its powerful marketplace machine — from optimizing word-search algorithms to analyzing competitors’ sales data to using its customer-review networks — to steer shoppers toward its in-house brands and away from its competitors, analysts say.

Update: October 16, 2018: The below excerpt is from a Bloomberg published article: Amazon Doles Out Freebies to Juice Sales of Its Own Brands

Amazon has more than 120 brands, about 100 of which were introduced over the past two years, according to TJI Research. One is Amazon Basics motor oil. Less than three months since its July debut, the product has a 4.5-star rating based on about 100 customer reviews. That’s almost as many reviews as a similar Valvoline product sold on the site for six years. More than 80 percent of the reviews for Amazon’s new oil came through the Vine program; the Valvoline oil had zero Vine reviews.

#Amazon #DirecttoConsumer #Private-label # AmazonThirdParty #AmazonSqueeze

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