presents a win-win scenario for both Amazon and its retailer customers. As in the case with ToysRus.com, the Company has leveraged its core assets to provide three critical components of a successful e-commerce strategy to retailers, including: (1) a scalable and proven e-commerce technology platform, (2) marketing capabilities in terms of access to 30 million e-commerce buyers at Amazon, and (3) outstanding back-end products fulfillment capabilities (that represent one of the Company's core differentiators versus competitive e-commerce distribution capabilities). In turn, retailers typically enjoy similar core competencies in their land-based retailing business, namely merchandising, pricing control and inventory risk. As with the ToysRus.com relationship, both companies leverage the strengths of their respective business models to share in the costs of conducting e-commerce. In this regard, ToysRus.com has the potential to lower its timing to breakeven earnings in its e-commerce business, while Amazon has the potential to scale the number of e-commerce orders through its fixed-cost distribution network, thereby increasing the likelihood of breakeven earnings [by the fourth quarter of 2001]" (Patel, p.7).In addition to the aforementioned justifications for selecting this strategy, is the fact that the QSPM Model favored this strategy over the international expansion strategy. The platform monetization strategy yielded an attractiveness score of 6.30, as compared to a score of 5.15 for international expansion, primarily due to reasons already mentioned. The only drawback to this strategy was a "report that the key finding signaling a challenge to Amazon's growth is that consumers view the online retailer as an outlet for media products-books, CDs, and videos-rather than as a store carrying an array of items such as kitchenware, garden furniture and hardware tools" (Junnarkar, p. 1). However, the advantages appear to far outweigh t...
