Shoppers are abandoning Wayfair to go to Amazon
After Wayfair lost its leadership position as the number-one online provider to Amazon, the retailer is now scrambling to reinvent itself. Wayfair is laying off some 20% of its staff, and Amazon says the company is cutting 10% more workers, including three of its top five executives.
A former Wall Street executive, Wayfair has been scrambling to reinvent itself to compete with Amazon. The company had to take a hit on its business model in order to shift its focus to selling only its own merchandise and not selling other people’s merchandise. Its model had become a lot more expensive than it once was.
Wayfair’s CEO, Brian Murphy, said in a blog post that he expects to deliver a first-quarter report that will highlight the “positive impact” of the move. The company’s revenue and profit are up nearly 60%, he said, and that the increase is a result of the new product categories that Wayfair developed.
The company recently moved into new categories with eDressers, which include home decor and bedroom sets. Customers are already getting a steady stream of eDressers, he said.
The shift has also allowed Wayfair to add more categories to its product line, from bath and linens to household furniture.
“There are a lot of people who have a hard time buying other people’s merchandise, and they are looking for a way to get it,” he said. “Wayfair.”
“Amazon.”
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The most surprising thing about this move is that the company didn’t have anyone in charge of managing its product categories and offering a complete suite of products. You would think that Wayfair would have someone on staff with expertise on how to make a category of products successful.
He continued, in this blog post, on the company’s efforts to innovate in categories it had previously ignored. The move into eDressers is a good example of that.
The fact that the CEO of Wayfair, the top product retailer, is now announcing the company isn’t doing so well, and that Amazon is gaining market share, is just a
