Essentials Magazine Essentials Fall 2017 | Page 40

Trends in Distribution
they saw it coming and had time to
react. In today’s business world, busi-
ness disrupters come on the scene and
change the way an industry views its
value proposition and customer base.
Consider Amazon, which has in-
troduced a new business model in an
electronic world — one that does not in-
clude branch offices and infrastructure
like the model distributors have built
over time. Entities such as these do not
necessarily compete directly with dis-
tributors right away, but as they expand
their reach, their model brings them
into direct competition. AmazonSupply
featured more than 2.25 million prod-
ucts before closing and reemerging as
part of Amazon Business in May 2015.
In less than a year, Amazon.com Inc.
sold $1 billion in goods on its new B2B
marketplace, and customer purchases
are growing about 20% each month.
Because business disrupters rarely
announce themselves, distributors need
to be on the lookout for them, keeping in
mind that they can come from within and
outside of their line of trade. Amazon
started out in the mid-1990s as an online
bookstore. As the company expanded its
lines to CDs and DVDs, few companies
outside of book retailers viewed it as a
disruptive force. Even as Amazon con-
tinued to expand to other products in the
online retail space, few distributors were
taking notice.
With the launch of AmazonSupply.
com in 2012, however, some distributors
began to evaluate the online retail giant’s
effect on their business; others continued
to view the company