![]() This makes Amazon (and similar e-commerce big players) able to anticipate customer needs and fulfill them more effectively than any competitor in almost any industry. This effect is usually explained by the perceived customer benefits attributed to Amazon (low pricing, huge product selection, excellent customer service, efficient shipping and return policy) combined with the company's “customer obsession” based on the analysis of customer-based metrics (Denning, 2019). “Death by Amazon” (Solon & Wong, 2018) is the most common expression used to identify the decline in sales in (or even closing of) physical stores affected directly or indirectly by the e-commerce leader (Blitz, 2016). On the other hand, e-commerce sales have been boosted during the epidemic, with Amazon taking the lion's share by tripling its profits in 2020 with a 37% increase in sales revenues and 39.1% increase in e-commerce ads year-over-year, which represents 75.7% of the overall e-commerce ad spending (eMarketer, 2020). The Covid-19 pandemic has worsened these devastating effects on brick-and-mortar retailers: most stores selling non-essential items were ordered to close during lockdowns in several parts of the world, and market analysts forecast more than 15,000 store closures in 2020 in the United States alone (Thomas, 2020). Just in the United States, in 2017 there were 5321 store closures, up 218% year-over-year (Fung Global Retail & Technology, 2017). In several cases, the gains for e-commerce retailers are at the expenses of “traditional” brick-and mortar shops, which have to quickly change their models and formats (Hagberg et al., 2016), thus differentiating themselves from pure e-commerce players. Currently, Amazon accounts for nearly 40% of all US e-commerce purchases and has driven half of all retail growth in the last 5 years.Īs online shopping becomes more and more popular, the retail landscape is changing rapidly. The Covid−19 pandemic has probably accelerated this process, as shown by the increase in 32.4% in ecommerce sales in 2020 (eMarketer, 2020). Across the globe, e-commerce sales approached nearly $3500 trillion in 2019 (with an increase of over 20%), which represents about 15% of total retail sales (eMarketer, 2019). Increasingly more consumers worldwide in fact are buying online. The digital revolution has changed the ways firms operate, thus significantly transforming manufacturing with flexible and personalized forms of production (Mourtzis & Doukas, 2014) as well as service industries by dematerializing all the stages of the consumer buying process (Nylén & Holmström, 2015). We argue the need for further research to better clarify Amazonification in terms of customer impatience and dissatisfaction in general, also going beyond price and logistics issues, which are usually considered as the main constitutive factors. Compared with corresponding evaluations on the Italian Amazon website, the negative sentiments revealed in consumers' comments on Facebook suggest that the Amazon's service standards have raised consumer expectations and have made consumers less satisfied when they interact with other retailers. The findings show that there is a wide diffusion of consumer comments and service complaints related to the Amazon effect on consumer electronics retailers, especially regarding price, customer service, in-store staff, and post-purchase support. Based on natural language processing techniques, a content and sentiment analysis of users' comments drawn from the Facebook pages of three leading consumer electronics retailers in Italy over a two-year span (2016–2018) was used to evaluate the dissatisfaction toward these retailers associated to Amazon-related service attributes. After clarifying the meaning of the Amazon effect and reviewing the studies on consumer complaints online, this paper aims to identify key triggers for the Amazon effect from consumer comments on social media. Such Amazon-driven perceptions of service attributes are sometimes referred to as the ‘Amazon effect’. While Amazon's disruption of the retail market has been associated with significant changes in consumer behavior, empirical studies on how interacting with Amazon has changed customers' expectations toward other offline/online retailers remain scarce.
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