Opinion: The secret to stopping Amazon's world domination

However, the naysayers failed to notice the deliberate nature of this move, and as a result of the focus on research and development Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos has managed to pull off the single greatest trick in retail history: impending world domination, if it plays its cards right.

Yet it faces significant challenges to the market dominance that many predict and, as they say, the road to success is paved with failures.

First, the retail giants of the world have not taken Amazon’s onslaught lying down.

Walmart has been making strides in its ecommerce offering; with the $310m acquisition of fashion etailer Bonobos, its $3.3bn acquisition of Amazon rival Jet.com last year and, hardest for Amazon to replicate, looking to overcome the last-mile challenge by offering employees extra pay to deliver products on their way home.

Similarly, Target is competing with Amazon’s Prime Pantry service with the launch of Restock, a service that offers customers next-day delivery of items, at a cheaper rate.

Target is again able to utilise its brick-and-mortar store network and its employees and, as a result, deliver a more efficient service.

Clash of the titans

And it’s not just retail stalwarts giving Amazon a run for its money. If Amazon is the ecommerce Alpha of the West, then Alibaba and JD.com are certainly the Alphas of the East.

With JD.com paying $397m for a stake in Farfetch last month and Alibaba selling $550bn of merchandise in the last fiscal year alone, they are not to be ignored.

In fact, Alibaba’s Taobao marketplace and Tmall sites allow them to dominate their market in ways Amazon can only dream of.

“The Tmall Genie has all the frills you’d expect from a voice assistant, but it also links directly to Alibaba’s online store and costs less than Amazon Alexa – which means it is unlikely that Alexa will get a look in in Eastern markets”

In addition, they offer cloud services and the successful Groupon equivalent – Juhuasuan.

Additionally, Amazon has made no secret of its desire to dominate the voice assistant market, being the first to unleash Alexa to the public.

But the race here has only just started and Alibaba’s launch of its own voice assistant yesterday is a spanner in the works for Amazon.

The Tmall Genie has all the frills you’d expect from a voice assistant, but it also links directly to Alibaba’s online store and costs less than Amazon Alexa – which means it is unlikely that Alexa will get a look in in Eastern markets.

Apple is also set to enter the voice assistant market and Samsung is rumoured to follow suit, while Google is rapidly improving its Home device offering. All of this means that Amazon will struggle to remain top dog for long.

Eastern promise

Beyond competition from others, there are other challenges Amazon faces. As a brand, it definitely isn’t a universally loved beast.

The current retail environment is reminiscent of the movie RoboCop, where OCP dominates the city. OCP, or Omni-Consumer Product, is effectively a mega-corporation that creates products for virtually every consumer need – remind you of anyone?

There is no doubt that Amazon will continue to disrupt industry after industry and grow at a rapid pace, but as it steamrollers Western markets, Alibaba holds a strong position in the East.

With Alibaba now knocking on Europe’s doors, having already expanded into Russia, we may soon see Amazon experiencing a taste of its own medicine.