Rolling for Initiative is a weekly column by Scott Thorne, PhD, owner of Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois and instructor in marketing at Southeast Missouri State University.  This week, Thorne looks at the company that touches 36% of all purchases.
 
I ran across an interesting article in Business Week recently regarding Amazon and how much influence the company indirectly has over our purchase decisions.  According to a survey of just over 1400 American consumers, roughly 36% of all purchases made by Americans intersect with Amazon in some way.  Either you first find out about a product on Amazon or you do some research on it on Amazon or you make the final purchase on Amazon but over 1/3 of all purchases made  currently interact with Amazon at some time before the purchase concludes.  It amazes me that one company has so much influence on our lives.
 
Amazon currently tops the list of retailers selling online with $48 billion in sales per year (Staples is second with $10.6 billion in sales; the behemoth from Bentonville, Walmart, lags a distant fourth with a mere $4.9 billion).  Of course, putting things into perspective, Walmart does over $460 billion per year in sales or about 10 times as much, meaning Amazon has quite a way to go to catch the company.  Still, though, Amazon, through reviews, selection and pricing, affects one out of every three purchases we make.  That's a staggering figure.
 
In order to increase its sales, Amazon now wants to influence your purchases even further, by increasing its ability to provide same day delivery of products, much like Walmart and other Brick & Mortar retailers.   Same day availability of products is currently the major advantage brick and mortar stores have over Amazon and other online retailers.  A customer can walk into a store, pick up a copy of Settlers of Catan or Get Bit and walk out with it the same day, playing it that afternoon or evening.  Currently, you cannot do that with product purchased from an online retailer.  With the exception of things such as software, movies, books and other items that can arrive electronically, the customer must wait at least 24 hours for delivery.   Even companies such as grocer Fresh Direct, take your order and then deliver it later, either that day or next.
 
Amazon, as the article notes, wants to change that by allowing customers to order an item online in the morning and have the physical product delivered that afternoon, still not as immediate as walking into a store and out with a game, but getting close (For those of you living in France, I see the French government wants to ban Amazon from offering both discounts and free delivery on books, arguing doing so amounts to unfair competition.  Given that, as I noted during my trip to France last year, the country only allows retailers to run sales at certain times of the year, I can certainly see this passing).
 
This, by the way, is why Amazon has come to support ending Congress' exemption for online retailers from collecting sales taxes in local municipalities.  Online only retailers do not have to collect sales taxes in states in which they do not have a physical nexus, so Walmart, with physical locations in every state, has to collect sales taxes for all online sales.  Amazon, which does not have such, only has to collect them in places where it has physical distribution centers, and in many cases, not even then.  However, in order to provide same day delivery, the company will have to have physical locations, exposing it to the requirement to collect sales taxes.  Ergo, it wants to make certain that other online retailers, not providing same day delivery, no longer have this competitive advantage.  For Amazon, yet another win.

The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.