Be the Low-Cost Leader

If you think you can take on Amazon in terms of scale, infrastructure and reputation be my guest. I think there are VERY few times this makes sense.

When there is a MAP (minimum retail pricing) on most items, the prices are really consistent across the entire web. While it prevents you from raising prices, it is nice in that it creates a floor.

Trying to compete on price is very dangerous because the site becomes pretty vulnerable, as the "Marketplace Fairness Act" and/or pricing changes from the manufacturer could really hurt it.

One of the reasons manufacturing fascinates me so much is that you can create a proprietary product that you don't have to compete with the world on. All of a sudden, Amazon becomes a great channel for sales. You own the SERPs. And you can price it at whatever the market will bear.

Of course, you've got all the issues that go along with fabrication. But you get a lot of upsides if you're able / willing to get involved and build something people want.

This is really my philosophy behind Right Channel. By offering a lot of value on what works - and what doesn't - people are more likely to buy from you.

Sure, they can get it a lot cheaper on Amazon. But if they try to price-shop their entire 7 piece bundle it gets really confusing. One of the big value is that you communicate clearly what will work, and what you recommend. When you have a cart of 7 items, it's much easier to pay an extra $20 to just simply finish the order as opposed to spending hours on Amazon trying to re-create it as their specs aren't nearly as good.

You look at companies like Zappos (which, ironically, is now owned by Amazon) and they sell shoes people can get lots of other places. But people choose them because they've built a brand around the experience people have.

Whether it's a mission, or an experience you're selling, I think building up a brand is another one of the viable strategies - although it's definitely a long-ball game.

In terms of competing with SEO, it's going to be really hard to do so against the big brands for the major keyword phrases going forward. But you can still beat them is in the medium-tale and long-tail keywords.

Amazon is so huge, they can only focus on the high-volume terms of a keyword. But the medium and long-tail keywords are really where the money is and I think it's still possible to compete on these front fairly effectively - ESPECIALLY if you specialize. It's much harder the larger you get, but if you're small and fairly focused - with good domain authority - I think it's still very possible to rank well for these types of phrases.

MORE TIPS

Ultimately you can compete by building a loyal following. How? By putting content and service at the heart of your strategy.

Being smaller means you are more nimble, and you can offer a more personal level of services, be more accommodating to specific customer requests (e.g. a call comes in late in the day from a guy who wants us to build and ship a server for tomorrow or you have a great idea for a video and it's filmed, edited and published a few hours later).

You can also not be restricted by rigid brand guidelines, poor communication issues or corporate red tape that can be symptomatic of larger companies so it's easier for us to inject our personality into our content and give a sense that you are real people rather than some generic faceless organization. A lot of our competitors operate what I call 'e-catalogues' ie sites listing thousands of products with next to nothing by way of added value. Try to do things differently but it's not just about throwing up a token blog, you need to work hard on producing genuinely helpful buying guides, how to guides and assets that people will appreciate.

As an example, use a standard data feed from CNET for images, descriptions, specs etc. but unlike everyone else doing likewise, edit the standard feed for our key products to give more information to our customers. Get a standard image showing the product from the front. Everyone else has the same standard image so take a shoot from other angles like the rear so everyone can see the various ports and interfaces on the server. Same goes for things like descriptions. Turn a standard headline description like:

HP PROLIANT DL360 G7 PERFORMANCE - XEON X5650 2.66 GHZ - MONITOR : NONE.

into something far more helpful like:

The HP ProLiant DL360 G7 is a 1U rack-mount server with 2 Xeon X5650 2.66GHz processors, 12Gb of RAM and a 3 year on-site warranty.

So if you're pulling in blurb from the manufacturer, reword it to make it better. The added advantage is you'll create unique content for Google to crawl - great for SEO.

Finally, don’t underestimate the power social media. You want to build a community so you have to engage with your target audience where they hang out. The reality is that this is not on your website. But it's not about sticking up a Facebook page and posting the occasional offer of course - you need a proper strategy before you dive in based on an understanding of who your customers are, what makes them tick, where they hang out (e.g. Facebook is not necessarily the place for me to engage with IT pros although we do have a presence there) and what their pain points are.

This post was contributed by "e CommerceFuel" Members