Amazon.com might miss Target
By Wes | August 9th, 2009
Companies are increasingly becoming more self reliant when it comes to ecommerce, many of them focusing more on overhead-minimal ecommerce than “brick and mortar” sales now. Much of the nuts and bolts of ecommerce used to be contracted out by companies to the wizards who understood it, but as Shopping cart software concepts and ecommerce services have become more open and competitive, and as they have become demystified, some large companies have even begun to manage their ecommerce entirely in-house. This weekend, Target announced that it would be doing just that. After nearly a decade of having Amazon.com manage their ecommnerce needs, the retailer figures that it could save money and offer a better “..customized multi-channel experience” for their customers by eliminating the middle man. Maybe someone at Target stumbled upon a Ronald Coase book or something.
Integrated design approaches to websites that factor in dynamic marketing and promotional directions as well as combining physical world storespace with online counterparts (like the online kiosks at Chapters and other retailers) mean it’s just logistically easier and more cost effective for retailers like Target to do this on their own. What remains to be seen is whether their integrated ecommerce platform will be as robust and well received (that is not too alien to their current ecommerce customers and not full of bugs) that this turns out to be the most responsible decision in the long run. Or will they go crawling back to Amazon? I think they’ll be OK…or will they?
They probably will.
…Or will they?
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Tags: Amazon.com, eCommerce, shopping cart software, Target
