What Weaknesses Does Amazon Have?
Say you were starting a company in an area where Amazon operates (shopping/ecommerce, cloud, etc).
You are pitching to an investor and Amazon comes up as a potential or existing competitor. What are their weaknesses? How would you exploit them?
I think their biggest weakness is their relationship with sellers. Sellers hate Amazon because their livelihood is dependent of Amazon's ever changing policies and bans. This is why most of them have a Shopify store and hope to create a brand on their own. But, they haven't succeeded yet. If you can provide a credible alternative for these sellers, there will be a stampede of sellers out of Amazon.
BigCo problems: slower decision speed, dehumanized support, limited social presence, volume requirements w/ supplier side, draconian terms, data collection and privacy issues...
Marketplace problems: limited control over 3rd party suppliers, fake products, lack of accountability for indirect damages...
Volume problems: fake reviews, hard to find specific niche products, lack of product details, standardized photos...
The same weaknesses that come up when you make any David/Goliath comparison. They are big, and slow to react, so you can hit them with speed and agility. Think early 90's when MicroSoft was slow to move to the web while tiny startups ate their lunch. Amazon will be hesitant to make major changes because they don't want to kill the goose that lays the golden egg.
AWS is pretty expensive. Might be possible for a tech driven company to cut out all the MBA types and undercut them on price.
Lack of curation. I would personally be happy to pay extra for a marketplace with a limited set of products that have been tested & vouched for, instead of Amazon's Wild West full of Chinese no-name fly-by-night brands.
The biggest issues I see Amazon's e-commerce operation having are discoverability of products, and quality of products (namely counterfeits and used products being sold as new via FBA)
Amazon's weakness is that they're big. Big like an Elephant, do you know why Elephants are scared of mouse? Because they are small and fast.
Read "Innovator's Dilemma"
No dark mode on their ecommerce website, or in the AWS console. Seems like a critical weakness.