The founder of SellerEngine, Ioan Mitrea, is attending IRCE 2013, the Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition, this week in Chicago.
This is a HUGE conference, with speakers including former Vice-President Al Gore, CEO of Rakuten Hiroshi Mikitani and our friends Kat Simpson and Janelle Elms.
Throughout the week he’ll be posting some brief thoughts on the presentations he’s seeing and the people he’s meeting.
Amazon & Me Workshop
The Amazon & Me Workshop started with really great data from Colin Sebastian from RW Baird and Co. He superimposed the Walmart growth curve from 1977 to 1992 to the first 16 years in Amazon’s life.
The surprising part is that they two curves were very similar but Amazon started diverging upwards.
Amazon is now growing faster than Walmart was at the same stage in their development.
This slide reminds me of some data I used in my keynote presentation at SCOE last week.
I included Amazon’s profit, so you can see how they’re reinvesting everything into their business to help fuel their growth.
Everyone seemed to be interested in predicting how soon Amazon will overtake Walmart in gross revenue. Colin suggested 2020 and Scot Wingo said it could come quite a bit sooner than that.
Amazon is tolerating lower margins than Walmart. Walmart’s margins have been steady while Amazon’s margins overall have been going down. This may help Amazon catch Walmart sooner than some think, at least when it comes to gross sales volume.
Scot said that Amazon was growing in line with e-commerce as a whole from 1997 to 2005 and they only started exploding once they starting adding a lot of 3rd-party merchants in non-media categories.
Scot shared an urban legend about what happened when Toys-R-Us decided to break up with Amazon. Apparently, they did it right before the holiday season and Amazon reacted by opening the toy category to 3rd-party sellers and ended up having a better holiday season than ever before.
Tomorrow we’ll take a look at Day 2, including the keynote address from Hiroshi Mikitani from Rakuten!