This question originally appeared on Quora, the knowledge-sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus.
Answer by Auren Hoffman, CEO of SafeGraph:
One big mistake that Amazon is making right now is that it is not giving anyone access to its data, customer relationships, and so on.
Amazon’s strategy has been to own 100 percent of the transaction—and that has worked out really well for them thus far. But it has an opportunity to power every e-commerce transaction by providing access to easy login, payments, authentication, and data on every buyer. It could make everyone’s e-commerce experience much, much better. Not only would that give Amazon more access to the pie, it will significantly grow the pie because it would provide a lubricant to make all e-commerce transactions (especially in mobile) better.
When it comes to e-commerce, Amazon is playing it very, very safe. And who can blame it? It is a truly amazing company that provides great products, makes transactions easy, and has wonderful customer service.
The thing that has helped it is that all the other large commerce players will not get together and form a co-op to compete with Amazon. Walmart, Target, Home Depot, Best Buy, Groupon, Zynga, and so on have not worked together in any way to share components such as data, experiences, login authentication. Amazon is betting that it will be too hard to coordinate the other commerce players, and it might be correct. But if there was a co-op of all the top retailers, it could be unstoppable. So Amazon is taking a bet that the world does not change—which is likely a good bet.
In addition, Google (via Gmail) has access to what consumers are buying across e-commerce providers (from reading email receipts). Of course, this is really valuable.
Besides Google, no other company in the U.S. has a sense of what people are buying more than Amazon. Even the average person is buying tons of items from Amazon. Their histories are really rich—and some span more than 15 years.
Amazon has done everything to hold the data for its own use only. It is super protective of the data. It is the only company I know of that masks and regularly changes its email receipts so companies such as Google have a hard time reading them. This closed system has served them well so far, but time will tell if it could be blind-sided by a more open data system.
What are Jeff Bezos’ biggest mistakes as CEO of Amazon? originally appeared on Quora. More questions on Quora:
