The Future of Retail Stores: Amazon's Competitive Advantage Analysis

This report analyzes the future of retail stores, focusing on Amazon's business strategy and competitive advantages. It begins with an introduction to Amazon as a leading online retailer, emphasizing its diverse product categories and customer-centric approach. The report details Amazon's current operations, including direct sales, third-party retailers, and its subscription service, Amazon Prime, highlighting its extensive fulfillment centers and the labor-intensive processes involved in order fulfillment. It explores Amazon's investments in automation, such as the Kiva system, and social networks, to improve customer experience and gather feedback. The report references research on omnichannel integration and the use of predictive machine learning to optimize retail store placement and improve performance. It concludes by examining Amazon's strategic positioning to become the world's largest retail store and its commitment to revamping its value proposition for the future. The report includes references to relevant academic papers and studies.

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The future of the retail store
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Introduction
Amazon Company prides themselves as the world largest online retailer that offers variety of
categories which satisfy most of the client’s desires (Piotrowicz and Cuthbertson, 2014). The
current operations of the organization is multifaceted as well as aligned well to their business
objectives. The organization has been able to meet the demand of the customers through deliver
of the merchandise which the clients want and they deliver them quickly.
Current operation of Amazon Company
Amazon usually sells their products directly to the clients. This is achieved though allowing the
third party retailers to be able to list on their products to their platform. Moreover, they maintain
subscription service with the Amazon Prime that enable the members to receive a fast shipment
delivery as well as access to the media contents.
The organization holds the largest inventories of the goods. To be able to support this endeavor
they have a massive warehouse which is regarded as the fulfilment centers. The fulfilment center
is the operation base for Amazon (Piotrowicz and Cuthbertson, 2014). This is where the process
of distribution takes place. This process could be labor intensive and it requires the use of many
seasonal employees during the holidays to be able to package and ship on these product more
quickly especially in the peak shipping times. When the clients places an order there is a picker
who receive this order on the scanner and they are informed on the location of each of the
merchandise.
According to Piotrowicz and Cuthbertson (2014), they have examined on the deployment
technologies the mobile devices as well as the social network towards the growth the retail store
technological solution. This is in line to what Amazon has undertaken particularly investment in
the Automation. There has been a lot of automation process which they have implemented to be
able to decrease on the cycle time for finding the items (Piotrowicz and Cuthbertson, 2014). An
example of this is the Kiva system. Moreover¸ they have also invested a lot in the social network
which has enabled them get review and opinion of their clients in terms of the delivery and the
quality of the product. Based on Piotrowicz and Cuthbertson, (2014), they have highlighted that
there is need to have a channel of integration such as the Omni channel that delivers seamless
clients experiences in regards to the channel.
According to study done by Karamshuk, Noulas, Scellato, Nicosia and Mascolo, (2013), they
key points which they have highlighted on the future of the retail stores through the use of
predictive machine learning feature through use of the dataset collected. With the use of this
technology the store would be able to locate new market and be able to advertise these products
from these segments (Karamshuk, Noulas, Scellato, Nicosia and Mascolo, 2013). Their research
also highlights on the ways for improving performance through use of the supervised learning
algorithms. This can relate to the case of Amazon organization in which they would need to
improve on their performance to improve the delivery of services. They have been able to
achieve this through forming of alliance value proposition. The organization has planned to
become the world biggest retail store and kill the other branded retailers. They are revamping on
their value proposition through positioning themselves for the future.

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References
Karamshuk, D., Noulas, A., Scellato, S., Nicosia, V. and Mascolo, C., 2013, August. Geo-
spotting: mining online location-based services for optimal retail store placement. In
Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and
data mining (pp. 793-801). ACM.
Piotrowicz, W. and Cuthbertson, R., 2014. Introduction to the special issue information
technology in retail: Toward omnichannel retailing. International Journal of Electronic
Commerce, 18(4), pp.5-16.