In the Wall Street Journal on June 25, 2022 Christopher Mims’s article titled ‘The Surprising Reason Your Amazon Searches Are Returning More Confusing Results Than Ever”.
This is his introduction to the article: “If you want to be reminded just how tiny you are, you could travel to a remote part of the world and behold the night sky, or stand atop a mountain and contemplate its immensity, or you could try to find the best garlic press on Amazon. Granted, there are many more stars in the night sky than the 300 or so garlic presses visible on Amazon’s U.S. site. But wading through page after page of those listings, for items with tens of thousands of collective reviews, is, like many searches on Amazon, increasingly an exercise in frustration, despair, and confusion. Frustration because it’s hard to know, given Amazon’s never-ending battle with fake news, whether the highest-rated item is actually all that great. Despair because as psychologists have long known, giving people more choices can actually make them less happy with the one they ultimately pick.”
Mr. Mims goes on to point out that this is the result and danger of the Marketplace concept where unknown and often untested sellers use a known retailers ‘brand umbrella’ to offer an increasingly confusing assortment of offer redundant and duplicated products.
Sure – the Marketplace concept allows a retailer to pound their chest about their SKU assortment which may impress the investor community but only creates dissonance with the customers who have learned to trust this retailers brand for past purchases but now find themselves confused by too many conflicting choices.
Most big box home centers today are over-SKU’d in their stores and on their website. The goal should be to make it easy for the the store to stock the product, for the salespeople to sell the product and for the customer to buy the product. Whether off-line or online, it is the duty and obligation of the retailer to curate the right assortment to best serve the customer with products and service that reflects their brand promise. The implementation of a Marketplace concept works against such credibility. This path is like a ticking time bomb that can damage a company’s most important asset — its brand. The customers do not want more choices as much as the right choice for their project. Smart retailers will make it easy to buy. They will not embrace the Marketplace concept but will use carefully chosen products that can be drop shipped from their vetted suppliers to their customers.
The bottom line? — Quit chasing Amazon with more and more SKU’s and focus instead on enhancing the shopping experience of your customers in-store and online.