Platform Digest — 21.02

👋 On time for your weekend: a weekly round-up of stories at the intersection of #ecosystems, #platforms, #society and #business that stood out.

Being an Amazon Seller in 2020:

[T]he typical established Amazon seller has margins of around 15%. At that level of margin, moving your sales from Amazon to eBay would result in a 38% improvement in profits, which is huge. Shifting those sales from Amazon to one’s own website would represent a more than 3x increase in profits! Of course, if this were easy, we would have done it already. Unfortunately, getting traffic to one’s website is oftentimes a costly affair and it could be expected that a good portion of those profits would go to Facebook or Google.

👩‍🎓 Infrastructure is the moat—Molson Hart

Evolution of the Meal:

Vertically-integrated cloud kitchens, bundles, subsidies, schedules, and routing combine to drive the flywheel for Uber (or whoever else takes this strategy in the US or other countries – I could easily see Amazon leverage its massive Prime membership base, Whole Foods kitchens, and Amazon delivery service to offer a Prime Meal bundle) to generate a huge user base to densify their cloud kitchens. With one (or two) winners serving a given geographic location, the advantages of centralization, along with scheduling, could also greatly cut down on the number of drivers out on the street.

🤓 Is infrastructure eating the world?—NZS Capital

Ecosystem repositioning:

Where the architecture is especially rigid, for instance driven by regulation or a strong government customer, the ecosystem runs the risk of becoming stale. Due to the difficulty of incorporating change, the ecosystem’s ability to adopt productivity-improving innovations is so limited that, rather than individual players, the ecosystem as a whole may be disrupted.

😌 The sum is bigger than the parts—Jan Bosch, LinkedIn