Amazon provide FBA for sellers, storing their products in Amazon’s fulfilment centres and pick, pack, ship, and provide customer service for the products. With Amazon handling logistics, sellers can save valuable time and resources.

Compare with other E-commerce websites, Amazon have instant access to purchase-ready customers. Amazon shoppers often skip the awareness phase and already know what product they want. This access to customers with high buying intent is one of Amazon’s competitive advantages and good for new businesses looking to grow their audience.

E-commerce create low switching cost and readily available substitutes for customers, putting more pressure on Amazon because customers can transfer from one to retailer to other at low cost.So, Amazon invests a large amount of providing high-quality products and services to its customers and gains advantage on other players.

The rivalry in the online retail industry is high.In recent years, the number of players entering the industry has increased with many retailers, small scale brands, and startups are starting to sell their products online.The main competitors of Amazon are Walmart, Flipkart, Alibaba, eBay and many more. All these players give intense competition to Amazon.

Amazon respects the intellectual property rights of others. As a seller, you are responsible for ensuring that the products you sell on Amazon comply with all applicable laws and regulations are authorized for sale or re-sale and that they do not violate intellectual property rights such as copyrights, patents, trademarks, and rights of publicity.

The product you list and ship must exactly match the description, pictures, and all other information on the product detail page. Items must be delivered to the buyer in the condition described on the product detail page without any damage or defects.

Though currently there is no very large and well-established “New Retailing” business operating throughout the whole world, enterprise in such a form might be the most substitute for Alibaba. When e-commerce made people unable to get direct access to the product and service before they place the order, the integration of offline experience and online purchase of “New Retailing” could indeed provide customers with most satisfied offerings. “New Retailing” is not like a traditional offline store building its online presence for bringing convenience to consumers who do not want to spend time on transportation, the introduction of digital technologies could help “New Retailing business” better have an insight into the needs, demands and preferences of its customers, and thus make specific recommendations to different customers based on their backgrounds, behaviours through business analytics. Though the application of digital technologies seems like a remote thing, young people could indeed get quicker to accept it, just like those who showed no rejection towards Amazon several years ago. Generally, the threat brought by the emerging substitute could be moderate.

It is clear that Amazon is a giant in the e-commerce industry, and when having a particular attention to its presence, it is a platform that helps achieve communication and exchanges of sellers and buyers: sellers showcase their products, and buyers get access to such products online and make buying decisions perhaps by comparing these products’ characteristics like quality, price, material, etc. However, Amazon has more functions besides a platform, Amazon is indeed a third party. What does a third party mean? Amazon has made indeed massive financial and nonfinancial investments in “warehousing, distribution, marketing, making user-friendly website, customer service, logistics” (Khan, 2017), and this might be why that it could win great trust from both buyers and sellers as a retailer for many years, after all, both of the two parties have enjoyed good experience in their roles with services provided by Amazon.