Amazon is in this super-enviable position where it’s a platform and every other retailer is not. It’s fundamental to Amazon that every new customer is cheaper to acquire than the last one and is more valuable. 

For traditional retailers, every new customer they acquire is more expensive than the last one—they’ve already acquired all the easy-to-get customers that have an affinity for their brand or the products they sell. And every new customer they get is less of a brand loyalist and spends less of their wallet share with them. 

For Amazon, adding more planks to that platform—or in this case, more bricks to that platform—has a synergistic effect on the rest of the ecosystem. If it puts 3,000 stores out there and that changes a bunch of people’s behavior for buying lunch, maybe that’s also what causes them to shift their replenishment purchases from Walmart to Amazon, or their video watching behavior from Netflix to Amazon. 

Sourced through Scoop.it from: retail.emarketer.com