Former Amazon employee, my comments do not necessarily reflects the views of my (former) employer, yadi yada.
Amazon's fulfillment infrastructure is the best in the world, bar none, full stop. It is so far ahead of every other online retailer that it's pretty sobering to think about.
Amazon can get items to you faster, more reliably, more cheaply than just about anyone else, by a pretty ridiculously wide margin. There is a tremendous amount of extremely non-trivial know-how within Amazon that permits them to operate like this. Even if you had access to all the money in the world you'd still have a hard time cloning Amazon's infrastructure... and at this stage, even if you had the know-how, the amount of money required is not within the realm of a startup's reach.
Compared with Groupon, whose uniqueness is entirely public knowledge, who have no capital infrastructure that is hard to clone. Who have no trade-secret business processes that give them a leg up over the competition. You can do exactly what Groupon does with a trivial amount of cash and know-how (and people do, see the ridiculous number of Groupon clones).
Amazon's acquired land is defensible, Groupon's is... really not.
Amazon's fulfillment infrastructure is the best in the world, bar none, full stop. It is so far ahead of every other online retailer that it's pretty sobering to think about.
Amazon can get items to you faster, more reliably, more cheaply than just about anyone else, by a pretty ridiculously wide margin. There is a tremendous amount of extremely non-trivial know-how within Amazon that permits them to operate like this. Even if you had access to all the money in the world you'd still have a hard time cloning Amazon's infrastructure... and at this stage, even if you had the know-how, the amount of money required is not within the realm of a startup's reach.
Compared with Groupon, whose uniqueness is entirely public knowledge, who have no capital infrastructure that is hard to clone. Who have no trade-secret business processes that give them a leg up over the competition. You can do exactly what Groupon does with a trivial amount of cash and know-how (and people do, see the ridiculous number of Groupon clones).
Amazon's acquired land is defensible, Groupon's is... really not.