I’ve been talking about the state of the high street for my last few posts and of course will continue to discuss and debate the future and where there could be some light at the end of the tunnel (looking specifically at the launch of Wellworths - a great well done to Claire Robertson and her team or re-invigorated and re-invented retail takes a step close to the high streets rebirth in local towns up and down the country. With Simon Douglas also trying to re-invigorate a handful of his ex-Zavvi stores this is a small retail revolution...

However amidst all this and looking at online - people and even other pure play e-tailers have always held a light up to Amazon (me being one of them) at what they have achieved over their 10 year stint at the top of the e-commerce pile - however I have been following as well as using their other services.

Amazon web services has been such a great breath of fresh air for SME businesses and start ups that can use various tools, cloud storage, payment gateways (EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon CloudFront) all at a very inexpensive and reasonable price point as well. Recently Amazon has done deals with IBM, Microsoft Windows & SQL which led me to think that in the current state of e-commerce how and where can Amazon actually grow?

There is really only so much that they can punt under the Amazon umbrella really and of course we have seen more additional partners and resellers come on board to Amazon to provide new product ranges and increasing Amazons overall SKU count. Which led me to think that if you start to build out your business back end that offers other e-tailers the chance to use your services and payment gateways then in effect that is merely one step away from being a “landlord” as such in a virtual digital world!

Look at it this way - if you compare Amazon to the new Westfiled Shopping Mall  where the owners found some land (server space) built the empty shell of a building (infrastructure) started to create unit sizes (web templates / rack space) and then started to tout for retailers to fill those empty units with a base package of rents & rates (erm.. same rents and rates but rather than be based on electricity and water.. Amazon charges the e-tailer based on data usage, storage, bandwidth and level of SLA and OLA etc.) So now Amazon become what most people thought about back in the late 90’s of how this could be achieved. Some even tried by building recommendation / comparison tools - but these were weak and lacked any credibility. Amazon has the brand, the knowledge, the expertise (no denying that being 31 online retailer of countless years) It also helps them start to drop some of their costs by protecting their EBITDA by off loading a lot of the usual drainage of costs such as theft, lost packages, damages etc... by dropping some of the lines that they moved into but actually cost them margin in shipping / tracking and return costs.

I can sort of see why and how Amazon would look to do this - Amazon start to take a back seat on certain sectors and product lines just now - introduce digital catalogues for the new breed of digital entertainment (Amazon MP3, Kindle, Video on Demand..) - as well as start to deliver essential storage solutions for  homes that need and require these services. Amazon suddenly do what a lot of retailers on the high street are thinking of doing and e-tailers are attempting do - which is offer more services rather than just products - only this time Amazon are in effect putting these into practice and just as some would write them off as an old tired e-commerce site that is looking fat and haggard from the outside, bursting at the seams - inside there is a fighting spirit very much alive with Jeff Bezos at the helm pushing the business through new challenges and delivering better and stronger results as AWS grows from strength to strength.

Never underestimate what Jeff & the Amazon team have lined up - they are only beginning their next 10 years - and I’m already signed up for the ride!