You’ll have options! So many options that, unless you have strongly held preferences about spatula brands — unlikely, given that you just typed “spatula” into Amazon — you’re going to need some guidance. BANKKY or KLAQQED? Should you give IOCBYHZ a look or just pay extra for the Oxo?
The shopping mall is an experience.
Showing every SKU, of course, is exactly the Amazon approach - 'the everything store', and it works well for some categories, and especially when you know exactly what you want. But knowing what you want is not necessarily the starting point - that's what needs to happen along the funnel. Amazon's relative weakness at curation, discovery and recommendation (I've seen data suggesting the recommendation platform is only 1/4 of its books sales) is, I think, a big reason why, after 25 years of ruthless and relentless execution, it's still only got to 25% of the print books market in the UK and USA. A bookshop (or any shop) is, yes, the end-point to a logistics system, but a good bookshop is primarily a discovery platform. That is, it's more about the tables than the shelves. And the tables are lists, not inventory.
Amazon, very obviously, is Google for products. It's good at giving you the best-seller you've heard of or the water filter for your fridge (the long tail). It's not so good at the things in the middle. Amazon is great at selling you what's on the table in the front of the bookshop, and at selling one copy a year of a million or so obscure titles, but it's not very good at showing you what's on the shelves at the back of the bookshop. It's not so good at selling the mid-list - things that you didn't know existed, or didn't know you wanted, before you saw them. It does have a recommendation product, but it's not clear how well it works, and indeed an interesting question for Amazon is how far it can grow before running into categories for which its commodity merchandising model doesn't work so well. (Even in print books, Amazon's market share only reached a quarter of the market after 20 years of ruthless execution).
Amazon is getting worse, but you probably already knew that, because you probably shop at Amazon. The online retail behemoth’s search results are full of ads and sponsored results that can push actually relevant, well-reviewed options far down the page. The proportion of its inventory that comes from brands with names like Fkprorjv and BIDLOTCUE seems to be constantly expanding. Many simple queries yield results that appear to be the exact same product over and over again—sometimes with the exact same photos—but all with different names, sellers, prices, ratings, and customer reviews. If you squint, you can distinguish between some of the products, which feels like playing a decidedly less whimsical version of “spot the difference” picture games.
Reflecting on his path at Pinterest, Sciarra shared some advice for founders and go-getters alike: “In the early stages of a product or a company, no one really knows what’s going to work,” Sciarra said via email. “Don’t take ‘no’s’—even ‘no’s’ from really smart, boldfaced names—too seriously.”
*Wirecutter* helped popularize a genre of lucrative recommendation content—where the site gets a cut of every purchase you make after you click on “affiliate” links to Amazon or other partner sites—and spawned a series of copycats. If you’ve ever searched online for the “best” *anything*, there’s a good chance that *Wirecutter*’s DNA was in almost every single article you found.
Here's a simple, actionable framework to get you started:
A multipreneur is someone who creates multiple products per year, with the aim of creating a company that creates companies.
With every decade children have become less free to play, roam, and explore alone or with other children away from adults, less free to occupy public spaces without an adult guard, and less free to have a part-time job where they can demonstrate their capacity for responsible self-control. Among the causes of this change are a large increase in societal fears that children are in danger if not constantly guarded, a large increase in the time that children must spend in school and at schoolwork at home, and a large increase in the societal view that children’s time is best spent in adult-directed school-like activities, such as formal sports and lessons, even when not in school.