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When Jeff Bezos cited e-commerce software company Shopify as an example of growing competition from Amazon in his testimony before a US Chamber antitrust subcommittee last year, Commerce Consultant Jason Boyce electronics and former Amazon seller, did not buy it. This then struck Boyce as a calculated claim, a false equivalence to get regulators to back down by overestimating Amazon’s competitive threats.
“When he brought it up, I thought it was a joke,” Boyce recalls. “Shopify doesn’t have a front door. It is not a market. They represent a small percentage of the total online market. “
This week’s news convinced him otherwise. Amazon’s acquisition of Selz, a 7-year-old start-up that helps entrepreneurs sell products online, signals its ambitions to go beyond its own ecommerce platform to help power sites stand-alone third-party retail, moving into a new area of online and one-on-one commerce with Shopify and BigCommerce.
The implications for Amazon and the retail economy in general are immense.
“They want to capture more and more of the Internet itself,” Boyce says.
Boyce is our guest commentator on this episode of the GeekWire podcast. He is the co-founder and CEO of Avenue7Media, and the co-author of The Amazon Jungle: The Seller Survival Guide for Thriving on the World’s Most Perilous E-Commerce Marketplace. A former U.S. sailor, he was an Amazon seller for 17 years, before finally giving up after Amazon repeatedly launched products that rivaled his, as detailed in the House Antitrust Subcommittee report. last year (page 279).
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