The most interesting thing about this article is how Amazon has moved into this space, and how their current offering diverges from the article's suggestions. Amazon does offer services as products that you can buy, with all the trimmings, including reviews. The part about one-click, normalized sales is pretty close to what Amazon does too. The interesting difference, though, is how Amazon treats the service providers as commodities. Although the Amazon services have ratings, the providers do not. This is different from the author's predictions, and a little strange to me, because it seems like different providers have so much variance and nuance that they really aren't interchangeable. I wouldn't ever use "Amazon Home & Business Services"[0] because I have no idea what I'm really buying, but this must be an intentional choice on Amazon's part. It'll be interesting to see where this goes; commoditizing a huge swath of the working population might not be so great.
That's because Amazon exactly wants to downplay the supplier aspect. If supplier A won't fulfill your order, supplier B will and in the process they will drive each other's prices down. The last thing Amazon wants is the supplier standing at the front.
I have a theory that in all markets, the last link to the customer will win. Anything happening upstream will be commoditized away, either by obscuring the source, slapping a private label on, product placement and promotion, etc. It used to be that physical stores took pride on carrying prestigious brands, but it's no longer the case online.
This is the worst things that could happen to brands such as Nike or J&J; on Amazon, their products are just more items in a never ending category, sitting alongside rivals, knockoffs and copycats. They don't get preferential treatment. Those brands will be pressured to move to direct sales to differentiate and control their destiny.
Furthermore, Chinese manufacturers are coming out of obscurity with their own brands and through AliExpress and the likes try to get directly in front of the consumer too.
Same thing with the TV market and how Netflix, owning the very link to the customer, is commoditizing and cutting off everyone upstream, and in the process it's pressuring Disney and others to move to their own platforms.
The consumer world of the next 10 years will be all about brands trying to differentiate and survive, exclusive distribution channels, direct to consumer and market fragmentation.
Good read, thanks. However it looks at the eminence of aggregators as a given. I'd argue that at least in the retail space, aggregators provide a very lacking experience and that there is way too much inertia with the established brands for aggregators to work long term. As Amazon commoditzes everything, brands will fight back. So right now, you'd see a Nike shoe on Footlocker window or on a TV ad and perhaps buy it on Amazon. But what happens in few years, when your local mall shuts down, together with its Footlocker, and what happens when you don't see the TV ad any longer because you only have Netflix which doesn't air ads? How does Nike get to you?
I think the next wave in the ecommerce space is a class of backstage services providing direct to consumer logistics and infrastructure while letting the brands control the shopping experience. Brands will be more global and more accessible. No more territorial distribution limits; anyone anywhere could log into Nike and buy their stuff direct. This will call for enterprise-grade Shopify like tools.
While Amazon does the backend stuff amazingly well, their frontend and product discovery is on the verge of unusable and I don't think it's by mistake. They want to put all sellers on an equal and interchangeable playing field and let them spiral down towards oblivion.
[0]: https://www.amazon.com/b?node=8098158011