Amazon is currently the #1 online retailer in the US, #2 worldwide. In fact, over 40% of online purchases are made at Amazon.
But in today’s fast-paced world, being highly ranked now isn’t enough. Companies have to make preparations to that good in the future. After all, while it’s almost impossible to imagine Amazon ever declining, all you have to think about is Sears — what many analysts called the “Amazon of the 20th century” and “Amazon before there was an Amazon”.
While Sears’ struggle is rooted in many causes, most analysts agree that a major cause was it not making investments in itself. Most shoppers know Amazon has plenty of side businesses and experiments to earn it extra dough, from the Kindle eReader which dominated Barnes & Noble’s Nook to the quickly-discontinued Fire phone.
But in fact, much of Amazon’s net income comes from web services, making its cloud computing business more profitable than its retail sales.
But Amazon of course isn’t going to give an inch as American customers’ most preferred online retailer. They had two big announcements recently to try to fend off its brick-and-mortar and online-only rivals.
Make Returns, Then Shop
First, Kohl’s will be accepting Amazon returns at all stores starting sometime in July.
So if you have a Kohl’s store nearby, you can take that manga that arrived damaged or that video game preorder you forgot to cancel to the store and let them deal with it. You don’t need to have packaging or anything. Based on the instructions here for the test stores, you just need to start the process online and have Kohl’s scan a QR code. You will likely still need to wait a few days for a refund to officially start processing, and some items are ineligible for returns per Amazon’s normal guidelines.
This option is convenient for many customers, as Kohl’s are in 48 states and sometimes catching UPS or finding a dropbox is annoying. Of course, the danger is that an easier returns process may lead to more returns — and Amazon has been known to close accounts with too many returns, some without warning.
“Too many returns” though is subjective, so who knows what percent or dollar amount causes your account to get flagged. High-value electronics are a common red flag, and in Amazon’s defense, other retailers do the same thing.
For most people, though, this won’t be an issue. It’s always good to make sure you have a reasonable expectation that you want the item and are going to keep it, and if you do get a notification from Amazon, take it seriously. In addition, in some cases, it might be better to contact the manufacturer if something is wrong with a product versus the vendor. But again, most will never have to worry about a ban, and so Kohl’s is an option to send back that broken anime figure you received.
Fast Gets Faster
Amazon’s other announcement is just for Prime members. Saw a good deal on that anime Blu-ray you’ve been wanting, but feel like two days just isn’t fast enough? Well good news: Amazon is working on making the new fast and free shipping option one day.
No timeline on when this will be the default, but Amazon is working on it for the rest of the year and is spending a bunch of money ($800 million) on improving their infrastructure and logistics to make it happen. Some metro areas have free same-day delivery (as short as two hours with a fee), but this will extend beyond the suburban areas. Amazon has been working on having their own planes and drones to cut costs. Other retailers spent a lot of time and money to match Amazon’s two-day, so no doubt they see this as a threat.
One concern is that Prime is going to once again have to raise its costs in order to pay for all of this. Prime (which is no longer called Amazon Prime but just Prime) is currently $119 a year, although there are ways to bring it down, like being a student. Like others, I do wish there was an option to only pay for the Prime benefits I use, but that’s probably never going to happen.
Final Thoughts
For me, neither of these will probably change my shopping habits much. Once in a while it might save a trip to Walmart for me or I’ll try a large kitchen electric out without worrying about return shipping. But UPS comes to my house often enough that I usually hand off my Amazon returns no problem or can easily swing by a UPS dropbox. As for shipping, I like to choose slower shipping in order to get $1 digital rewards that I spend on manga.
For many others though, these changes are likely to keep Amazon’s dominance as an e-tailer as it tries to eliminate reasons to go shop elsewhere.