Amazon counterattacks... The largest plan that "dropped the number due to the corona wreck" (Gentosha Gold Online)-Yahoo! News

In the corona crisis, new startup companies are being born one after another on the digital frontier in the United States. It is said that the giants of Amazon and Wal-Mart are eyeing the market. What's going on in the US market? *This series is an excerpt and re-edited from Mr. Doug Stevens's book "The Future of Retail: 10 'Retail Types and Consumer Questions' to Survive the New Era" (President Publishing).

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The digital frontier where startups are born

■ It may be surprising that Amazon has lost its share of the e-commerce market during the pandemic, rather than increasing its share. The reason is simple. That's because other vendors are starting to jump online. In such a short time, merchants from all over the world have heard about the online situation and entered the market. If you can't sell good things online, why not? That's all. The industry as a whole is bolstering its online sales, order processing, and delivery operations, greatly reducing the gap with Amazon. The problem is that many retailers are trying to catch up with e-commerce methods that have been around for 25 years. Amazon, Alibaba, JD.com, and Walmart are involved in e-commerce businesses with a history of more than a quarter of a century. Just as the leading brands have recreated new forms of retail from the ground up, if we are to enter from now on, we must find a new retail path with the intention of remaking online sales from the ground up. The systems and interfaces we take for granted in online sales today will, in ten years, look as old-fashioned and nostalgic as the mail-order catalogs of yesteryear. ■Grid design is no longer needed In 2018, a venture capitalist contacted me and asked if I could meet the founder of a startup company that I was considering investing in. This kind of invitation from venture capital is not uncommon. In short, it is a pressure test to introduce potential investee founders to industry insiders and explore the viability of the business concept. It may be possible to analyze reactions, collect information, and eventually lead to referrals to potential customers. For some reason, the case piqued my interest, although it often ended in vain. The startup, called Obsess, was touted as pioneering an entirely new online shopping experience. A few days later, I got on the phone with the founder, a woman named Neha Singh. A computer science major at MIT, Singh said he worked as a software engineer at Google for five years. Although I have a science and engineering background, I have always been interested in fashion design, so I started attending the New York State Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in New York City in between jobs. He worked on building an e-commerce site specializing in luxury goods for a startup company in the fashion industry, and became interested in the fusion of technology and fashion. After talking on the phone, when we met again, Shin, who experienced this job, noticed that "the front-end interface of the EC site (the screen that the user directly uses, the operability, etc.) has not changed at all for a long time." . “Amazon’s familiar interface was originally developed 25 years ago to sell books, and today all other e-commerce sites have similar interfaces. Servers, databases, etc. that you don't see) reflect a number of innovations, but the front end is largely unchanged: Almost all retail brands have the same standard grid interface (a grid of design elements). It’s built on the basis of a placement method,” Singh points out. What's more, for brands that don't want to be stuck in that mold, development costs usually skyrocket. Shin's initial realizations later turned into convictions. He was in charge of building the website for the fashion magazine Vogue, and with the launch of the digital version, he began to develop deep relationships with various brands. When it comes to experiences on websites and mobile apps, he realized that most brands are more or less the same.

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