Amazon 's Big Play For Grocery Business Essay

Amazon is a Fortune 500 e-commerce company based in Seattle, WA. It is one of the top companies that sells the most goods over the internet.

Question 1. Compare walmart.com with amazon.com. What features do the sites have in common? Which are unique to Walmart.com? To Amazon.com?

How would you define Amazon’s industry? What difficulties do you encounter identifying primary competitors and key lines of business?

The supply chain management is considered as a management concept from past two decades as the customers are concerned about timely and safe delivery. The competitiveness has been increasing among the companies to deliver the products as quickly as possible to the customers all around the world. This has made the supply chain management as a vital tool for the management. This is also measured as a competitive parameter for the companies.

Every retail location carries a variety of products that distinguishes it from other stores in the same chain. Not surprisingly, it is difficult to achieve economies of scale. Supply Chain Mackey describes his consumers as being “part of a cult”. Whole Foods believes that the company’s emphasis on perishables and locally-sourced produce differentiates their stores from run-of-the-mill supermarkets and attracts loyal and devoted customers. However, “fresh produce” is one of the most challenging product categories to operate due to limited product shelf life and high cost of spoilage. Whole Foods has tried to circumvent most of the problems inherent in supplying fresh produce to its stores by sourcing locally and having short and flexible supply chains. In the case of fruits and vegetables, Whole Foods has buying relationships with local farmers who supply the store with seasonal produce. Thus, if one farmer is unable to produce a sufficient amount of yellow corn or heirloom tomatoes, the shortfall can be made up by another farmer. Although challenging to perfect, these short supply chains are agile and difficult for other big retailers to duplicate.

Amazon.com, Inc., on May 28, 1996, started offering a range of products and services through on-line webpages. This new company began to offer products including merchandise and content that was purchased for resale from multiple vendors and sellers ranging from lots of third-party ways. The Amazon.com business has three different segments within its operating environment: Amazon Web Services, North America, and International make up the operating areas. The North American area for Amazon has segments that focus on the sales from retailers of consumer items or product from sellers through its website Amazon.com.

Due to the growing competition and diminishing market share, companies are opting for different strategies to achieve their survival objectives as well as growth. Companies are thus executing grand strategies to provide their businesses with a clear direction for its strategic actions. These strategies, therefore, aim at both short term and long term sustainability and growth, and they include innovation, market development, product development, and concentration.

Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods will revolutionize business, by increasing automation to remove people's jobs. Ester, a cashier at a bakery in Manhattan, had senior citizens become fond of her and the imminent conclusion of robots being introduced would likely remove that friendly bond that we have towards employees as customers. Thus, sociability will vanquish, in which her sister, who suffers from schizophrenia, values interactions with employees at the CVS where she picks up her medications. Without interactions with other people we find amusing, the world will have fewer and fewer opportunities to be in company with.

     The main substitute to buying your food from a grocer is going out to eat. A 2002 Gallop poll shows that Americans eating more meals outside of the home than ever before. When examining today’s changing supermarket consumer in Progressive Grocer, Buck Jones made this observation: “To get the total picture we need to look outside the supermarket arena at how customers are using other retail outlets to satisfy the needs that we could be addressing.” The success

“Amazon Begins Delivering Farmers Market Goods to Southland Customers” by Shan Li and Russ Parsons (LA Times, September 1, 2015)

The groceries segment of India is one of the major components of the Indian retail market of which the groceries holds a whopping share of 60% as food is the basic requirement of all the people irrespective of their class. Online grocery shopping is one of the mega-trends which involves sale and purchase of groceries over the internet. The concept though conceived in the west is gaining lot of popularity in the emerging markets of India. Since the industry is growing at a tremendous pace it has attracted huge investments by venture capitalists and angel investors. The market has seen lot of emerging players of which Big Basket, Zopnow, Aaramshop and Local Banya leads from the front. These startups have been very successful because they currently are present in different cities and commanding leading sales. Although online grocery shopping is yet to catch up with the residents of many cities, yet all these e-commerce companies have started operating in many metro cities with an aim to change the way people do their grocery, veggie and staples shopping. Penetration of internet and the rise in the public's demand for convenience shopping among the population has

Amazon continues to grow, expand, and improve the goods and services the company provides through strategic mergers and acquisitions. In recent years Amazon has focused on acquiring a variety of companies that bring with them technologies from fields such as: robotics, education, voice recognition, and e-reader displays. One of Amazon’s most significant recent acquisitions came in March 2012 when Amazon purchased Kiva Systems, a Massachusetts based robotics company. The deal worth $775 million dollars was made in hopes that Amazon will be able to improve profit margins though the use of the robotic packing system produced by Kiva System’s. The robotics created by Kiva allows companies to manage inventory and streamline the order

Every company has their own supply chain in order to sort or produce goods. However, the company needs to manage supply chain to maximize its highest benefits. By having effective supply chain management, the company can ensure that the right product or service will be available at the time to the right place and at the right price (Kamal 2007). Amazon is one of the companies that have best supply chain practices in order to respond high level of responsiveness for the customers. Thereby, this paper explains about Amazon Company, analysis of Amazon’s supply chain, recommendations and barriers to implement will be discussed.

3. One possible recommendation is that Amazon could offer to only allow zShops that sell toys notavailable from Toys R Us. This scenario would allow Amazon to honor the exclusivity agreementwith Toys R Us, but continue to realize profits from specialty toy retailers. Toys R Us would benefitfrom this scenario because zShops would not be able to undersell on identical products. Also,consumers who go to Amazon searching for a specialty toy may end up ordering a toy from Toys RUs instead.

FreshDirect is a relatively new entrant to the online grocery market and relies on Porter’s Five Forces. FreshDirect relies on bulk purchasing to pass the savings to its customers. The ability for the company to turn a large profit and attract investors has made concept attractive to new entrants. FreshDirect uses quality, price, logistics, technology, and strong stakeholders’ relationships as barriers to entry and competitive advantage. Because FreshDirect focus on providing ready-made meals and