As Circuit City, Borders, or any number of other defeated corporations will tell you, competing with Amazon is hell. Jeff Bezos’s e-commerce empire is a muscled behemoth, with $75 billion in annual sales, Genghis Khan–size ambitions, and the leverage to wrangle extreme concessions from its suppliers. What Amazon does, it does very well, and that includes steamrolling companies that get too close to its turf.
“Amazon has such a lead at this point that trying to eat away at their core business is pretty challenging,” says Scott Tilghman, a senior analyst at B. Riley. Challenging, but not impossible. Like knights circling a dragon looking for patches of soft skin between the scales, smaller, newer companies have spent years scanning Amazon’s business model for weak points. And now, increasingly, they’re finding them. Here are a few ways competitors will try to chip away at Amazon’s dominance in the months ahead.
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