This is a short thread about Amazon& #39;s fulfillment moat vs. @Walmart and @Shopify who are both building out their own fulfillment networks.

It looks like it& #39;s about a single children& #39;s toy, but I think it has big implications for how this e-commerce battle shakes out.
We were given early access to WFS, which is Walmart& #39;s Fulfillment by Amazon competitor.

They store your inventory near where it is likely to be ordered so they can offer 2 day shipping to the entire United States.
When you store your inventory in amazon& #39;s FBA fc& #39;s you get a huge bump in sales, so I was optimistic that the same would be true for us as we were selling quite a few Brain Flakes every day (okay not that much, but a lot for a non-Amazon channel, see our walmart orders below!).
So we shipped in about 250 units, rather optimistically, and we were even able to lower our price from $18.99 to $15.99 because our shipping cost when from about $9 to $5 and change.

We should be crushing it right?
Uhhhh...not so much.

We went from selling 1-2 per day to selling 1 every 3 days.

And this is despite us lowering the price from $18.99 to $15.99!
But why would this happen? Surely people would appreciate faster shipping and a lower price? The problem was that Walmart added a $5.99 shipping cost for orders under $35, which is the same thing that Amazon does. So why does that matter for Walmart, but not Amazon?
Well, because no one actually has a Walmart + membership, whereas there are 150 million prime members. So the cost went from being $18.99 with free shipping to $15.99 + $5.99 = $21.98 for most people.

See how Brain Flakes looked before we had WFS vs. now
This is important because it shows that Amazon& #39;s e-commerce moat isn& #39;t just that it has 50x as many fulfillment centers as Walmart. It also has Amazon prime psychological and ACTUAL shipping lock-in.

Who is going to have a W+ and prime membership? https://twitter.com/Molson_Hart/status/1379291275631935489">https://twitter.com/Molson_Ha...
What should Walmart do?

GROCERY

It& #39;s walmart& #39;s only hope. Sign people up in droves for grocery delivery with W+ and then leverage those deliveries to angle your way into Amazon& #39;s turf for regular durable non-perishable good e-commerce.
You can follow @Molson_Hart.
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