Amazon launched an offshoot brand today called Endless that focuses on shoes and handbags.
Yes, it’s an Amazon-powered boutique. Yikes.
Executed properly this could be the start of something big. Think about it — little microcosmic communities dedicated to a subset of products — all unified with *your Amazon login*.
Imagine this, faithful shopper: gone are the days of independent account logins, of reentering your credit cards and shipping addresses, or worrying about customer service or flaky sellers. It’s not franchising the brand, it’s franchising the supply chain management and procurement might of Amazon all through a simple, standard API. And Amazon gets to play God — picking who can make use of that incredible resource and start secondary commercial offerings.
TechCrunch misses the point, only thinking that an Amazon.com shoe anywhere else is an just an Amazon.com shoe with window-dressing. But in reality, this goes far beyond that — and starts to build out new contexts for old habits with new behaviors to emerge. And with the benefit of all the customer data that’s been collected over the years, the attractiveness of building A-grade aStores could become huge.
Played right, this could be big. If not huge. Federated shopping with one identity.
Put it in this context… what if someone launched a slicker version of Flickr… more narrowly focused perhaps… but built entirely off the Flickr API… using BBAuth, the Flickr API and the host of other Yahoo! services? And let’s just assume that this little derivative app had some real promise? And, unlike Zooomr, you didn’t need to start the photo database over from zero, you could pull from the rich store of photos already on Flickr — but through an entirely new community interface? You could essentially keep Flickr going and then build up a whole new independent business that was just as profitable, simply growing the pie without cutting into the original. This, this is the power and promise of this idea — and with identity tying it all togther, well, it’s very interesting, indeed.
Factory Joe 