For my first article I chose Balancing Act found in a Digital Commerce 360 magazine. I
chose this article because not only does it pertain to today’s’ ecommerce world but also my job
as I work full time at an ecommerce job for LED lighting. To summarize the article is basically
talks about how Amazon is hurting other companies, big or small, by stealing their business
especially during the holiday season. During holidays such as christmas, birthdays of
friends/relatives, and especially black Friday, a huge amount of people (like myself) go directly
to Amazon (or even ebay for me) first instead of googling my needs and landing on someones
website. Companies are complaining that it is much more harder to gain the holiday sales and
get consumers to purchase from their websites so they must join Amazon as well to get in the
action of millions of buyers. According to statistics found in the article, “Only 38.8% of
consumers start their product searches on Google, according to a December 2016 Internet
Retailer survey of 515 U.S. adult online shoppers, while over half, 52.5%, start — and often end
— their searches on Amazon.” (Berthene, 2017, Page 2). This was surveyed last year so I can
only imagine how the statistics look this year, especially to the craze and media attention
Amazon and its owner, Jeff Bezos, received recently this year. Amazon has become #12 in
Forbes 500 and it is not hard to believe. Amazon received over a third of the visits to retail
websites in the remaining months of 2016 while accounting for 38% of those sales.
Amazon encourages shoppers to focus more on the price of a product which gains their
attraction on their site where its great for them but influential on other companies, especially
ones who primarily focus on quality. Generally people go on Amazon looking for the cheap
prices like the retailer Walmart. They are both globally known for having great prices for
