![]() As Donahoe puts it: ‘‘We view it actually as and. But the proliferation of smartphones and tablets has increasingly led to the use of digital technology to help us make those purchases, and it’s in that convergence that eBay sees its opportunity. We still buy more than 90 percent of everything we purchase offline, often by handing over money or swiping a credit card in exchange for the goods we want. (Retailers call this act of checking out products in a store and then buying them online from a different vendor ‘‘showrooming.’’) Amazon holds such sway that for many it’s the default place to buy things online.Īnd yet online commerce currently accounts for only about 6 percent of all commerce in the United States. And even if you do need to try something on, Amazon conveniently includes a bar-code scanner in its mobile application so you can compare prices while you’re in a store and then have the same item shipped to your home with just a few clicks. If you’re looking for a product that you don’t need to try on or try out, Amazon’s customer analytics and nationwide network of 40-plus enormous fulfillment centers is awfully tough to compete with. For some time now, physical retailers have lived in fear of the various ways in which Amazon can undercut them. There has been much talk about Amazon driving retailers out of business - most recently, and somewhat unbelievably, by proposing to use drones to deliver purchases. And these changes in the commercial landscape, he said, tend to be ‘‘phrased in zero-sum terms: big retailers versus the little guy. As he walked from store to store - a nearly empty GNC, a quiet Foot Locker - he pointed out how little had changed in physical retail stores over the last 30 or 40 years and what would have to change in the next few years in order for these stores to compete with Amazon and Walmart.Īs he sat in a patisserie on the mall’s ground floor, Donahoe touched on his usual themes: how technology has driven scale and automation how the big-box retailers have crushed Main Street the way in which our shopping experiences have become less dependent on human interaction. It was earlier this year, and from the outside the Westfield Valley Fair mall near San Jose had a kind of ghost-town feel to it. The passenger door opened, and out sprang John Donahoe, the chief executive of eBay, who began striding toward the store. A blue BMW crossed the cracked parking lot and rolled to a stop outside a tired-looking Macy’s.
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