Online Distribution What do you think of Amazon's move to online grocery delivery? Does it give the company a competitive advantage?

Amazon's move into online grocery delivery gives the company a significant competitive advantage against other online food retailers and smaller regional food chains. The basis of Amazon's competitive strength is its extensive expertise in supply chain management, logistics, pricing and the ability to quickly ramp up warehouses and integrate them into a broader network. In reality Amazon has emerged as a distribution-centric business first. Its retail operations capitalize on how effectively the company manages commodities and creates sales by using pricing and availability as the two main drivers of sales and resales. Based on all of these factors and the company's extensive expertise with cloud computing as evidenced by its Amazon Web Services (AWS) division growing faster than any competitor in the cloud platform arena, Amazon has the supply chain scale and technology...

As the company experiments with market concepts and fulfillment strategies in Seattle, Washington and throughout the Los Angeles area, the challenge will be increasing inventory velocity and managing supply chain performance to profitability. The one area of the Amazon business model that is a challenge is profitability. As a distribution-centric business, it has a very low Return on Sales, razor-thin margins and faces a constant challenge of being profitable. In the online grocery delivery business, Amazon has the opportunity to sell higher-end products and therefore turn this weakness into a strength over time. It will be a challenge however as their systems are designed for managing commoid8ty-like products that move quickly, delivering many inventory turns a year and…