How Your Small Business Can Stand Out Against a Backdrop of Amazon, Walmart, and Target
As a small business owner, you already know that there are very few opportunities to compete with the likes of Amazon, Walmart, and Target. In fact, for many small businesses, just having the chance to be heard above the noise of multi-million dollar advertising campaigns is a big enough challenge long before you start looking at things like brand loyalty, purchasing power, and reach.
The fact is, unless you have access to a product that nobody else does, the online giants and big-box retailers will always be able to crush you on price. Believe me, I’ve met countless small online businesses who have tried to go head to head against the big guys on price, and it’s killed them.
While many small businesses can exercise greater efficiency across their business than their larger competitors, and some might actually be able to turn this to a commercial advantage (we see this happening a lot on online marketplaces like eBay and Amazon), it’s when they try and scale their operations to compete on a level playing field (there is no such thing as a level playing field), that things get complicated.
Marketing costs are nearly always more expensive than initially envisaged and dramatically eat into margins. Then there are the additional logistical costs of…
