The 800 Pound Gorilla Amazon Tried to Kill is Google's Trojan Horse

Internet shopping has a good historical analog. Mail order catalogs. It took a long time for things to settle down, but eventually everyone wound up with both mailorder and retail outlets.

Even the 800 pound gorilla of mailorder, Sears Roebuck, became a hybrid. It took decades before they opened their first store, but today it is mostly known as a chain of department stores.

I am sure that the same will eventually happen to Amazon. However not for a long time.

Sheesh. Not that Google's tool doesn't have merit, it might.. but we'll have to wait for someone to write an article worth reading. This is silly.

The author compares buying a shoe rack on Google Shopping Express to buying on Amazon. He is impressed that a plywood laminated shoe rack sourced by Target is only $12 while a bamboo shoe rack on Amazon is $20, and makes much of imagining, zomg-like, 50% savings on his Amazon purchases over the year.

If you look at the same Amazon search results page where the author finds the bamboo rack, there is a serviceable resin rack for $13 (the author is obviously not going high-end with his plywood one). Four results down from his bamboo rack is a natural wood rack for under $16.

The real gorilla horse in the room is that the author goes on to lament $5 shipping for Google, which swamps any savings he was getting by going with inferior product. "Now, Google has to make sure its free delivery thing becomes well adopted the way Amazon Prime was, because the $4.99 delivery was a non-starter for me, and ruined the economics."

Twist ending?

Self-driving cars will make natural delivery vehicles. If Google partnered with local retailers to provide check-out via wallet and delivery via automated cars, it would disrupt more than just Amazon.

Google has all of the nascent building blocks in place: Google Wallet, Google Shopping Express, Google Shopping, Google Maps with StreetView for routing, automated vehicles, and, of course, eyeballs.