You Can’t Beat Amazon at Being Amazon. So Stop Trying.

September 20, 2026

For smaller online retailers, competing with Amazon or Walmart can feel like an impossible game.


Amazon has built enormous advantages around product selection and convenience. Walmart has spent decades building the scale required to compete aggressively on price.


Chewy COO Scott Anderson believes retailers should stop trying to win those battles on the giants’ terms.


In a recent interview with Supply Chain Dive, Anderson argued that ecommerce retailers essentially compete across four areas: price, convenience, selection and experience. His point is that for many specialty and smaller retailers, the fourth category may offer the greatest opportunity.


If You Can’t Win on Scale, Win on Experience


Anderson knows the Amazon model from the inside.


Before joining Chewy, he spent nearly a decade at Amazon, eventually becoming a vice president overseeing transportation and customer fulfillment in North America. Today, he leads end-to-end logistics at Chewy.


His assessment is fairly straightforward.


Amazon is exceptionally difficult to compete with on selection and convenience. Walmart is exceptionally difficult to compete with on price.


But experience is different.


Smaller and specialty retailers can potentially know their customers better, personalize the relationship and pay attention to parts of the buying process that become harder to individualize at enormous scale.


And Anderson argues that one of those opportunities is hiding in a place many businesses still think of primarily as an operational expense: delivery.


Delivery Is Part of the Product


For an ecommerce company, the customer experience doesn't stop when someone clicks “Buy.”


The package still has to arrive.


Anderson points to features such as adjustable delivery windows, proof-of-delivery photos and the ability to communicate more directly about a delivery as ways retailers can differentiate. Even the box and packaging materials contribute to the experience.


That's an important shift in thinking.


A business might spend enormous effort optimizing its website, photography, checkout process and customer service, only to treat the final physical interaction with the customer as a commodity.


From the customer's perspective, however, it's all one purchase.


The tracking notification is part of the experience.


The package arriving when expected is part of the experience.


Opening the box is part of the experience.


And when something goes wrong, that becomes part of the experience too.


Your Dashboard Doesn't Tell You Everything


One of Anderson's more interesting lessons comes from his time at Amazon.


He says Amazon looked at both aggregate delivery metrics and individual customer anecdotes. When one customer's experience revealed something materially different from what the overall numbers suggested, that discrepancy was worth investigating.


That's a useful principle far beyond ecommerce delivery.


A dashboard might tell you that 97% of orders are being handled correctly.

That's valuable information.


But the remaining 3% may contain the problem that eventually becomes much larger.


A complaint that initially looks like an isolated incident could expose a broken process, confusing communication, a technology problem or an operational gap that aggregate reporting hasn't made obvious yet.


The average tells you how the business is performing. Individual customers can sometimes tell you where it is breaking.


The mistake is assuming those two sources of information are competing with each other.


You need both.


When You Find a Problem, Fix It Fast


Anderson also makes another important point: customers have limited patience when they've already told a company what's wrong.


Once a customer has identified a problem, repeatedly making the same mistake becomes much harder to excuse. His advice is to use that feedback to identify the underlying issue and build a process to address it quickly.


For a smaller business, this can actually be an advantage.


Large organizations can have layers of systems, teams and processes between customer feedback and operational change.


A smaller company can often hear something on Monday and change the process on Tuesday.


That speed matters.


The goal isn't simply to resolve an individual complaint. It's to ask whether the complaint revealed something that should be fixed for every customer who comes next.


Your Delivery Partner Is Part of Your Customer Experience


Anderson's third lesson is about the relationship between retailers and the companies delivering their packages.


He argues that businesses shouldn't simply hand over an order and treat everything that happens afterward as someone else's problem.


Retailers should communicate specifically with delivery partners about what their customers need and what problems they're trying to solve. Those conversations shouldn't revolve exclusively around finding the lowest possible shipping rate.


That's because the customer doesn't necessarily separate your business from your delivery provider.


They ordered from you.


If the delivery experience is frustrating, your brand often absorbs at least some of that frustration.


That makes delivery providers more than vendors moving boxes from Point A to Point B.

They're participating in one of the final stages of your customer experience.


Smaller Can Be an Advantage


There's a broader business lesson in Anderson's advice.


Companies often look at much larger competitors and immediately start copying what makes those competitors successful.


More products.

Lower prices.

Faster shipping.

More technology.

More automation.


But scale advantages are extraordinarily difficult to defeat by simply trying to reproduce them with fewer resources.


The better question is:


What can we do exceptionally well precisely because we aren't Amazon or Walmart?


Maybe it's deeper product expertise.

Maybe it's more responsive customer service.

Maybe it's better packaging.

Maybe it's knowing your niche extraordinarily well.

Maybe it's noticing an individual customer's problem and fixing the underlying process before hundreds of other customers encounter it.


Or maybe it's creating a buying and delivery experience that feels like it came from a company that actually knows who its customers are.


You don't necessarily have to beat the largest competitor at what they do best.


You need to give customers a compelling reason to choose you instead.


Source: Max Garland, Supply Chain Dive, “3 tips from Chewy’s COO on gaining a last-mile delivery edge,” September 18, 2026.

Your Next Marketer Might Need to Code

October 26, 2026
Marketing is becoming more technical. As businesses adopt AI tools, automation and increasingly complex software, a new kind of specialist is emerging: the marketing engineer. For years, businesses have built marketing teams around familiar responsibilities: advertising, content creation, search engine optimization, social media and lead generation. Those responsibilities haven't disappeared. But the technology behind them has become increasingly complicated. Businesses now rely on advertising platforms, customer relationship management systems, email automation, website analytics, e-commerce software and AI tools. Making those systems work together is becoming an important part of marketing performance. That's where the marketing engineer comes in. What Is a Marketing Engineer? A marketing engineer combines marketing knowledge with technical skills. Traditional marketing specialists might develop a campaign strategy, create content or manage advertising budgets. A marketing engineer can help build the technical systems that make those activities more effective. That might involve connecting a CRM to advertising platforms, automating reporting, improving conversion tracking, integrating customer data or developing workflows using APIs and AI tools. The role connects marketing strategy with technical execution. Rather than relying entirely on separate developers, analysts and software specialists, businesses can use technical marketing expertise to bridge those functions. The Problem With Disconnected Marketing Systems Many businesses already have the technology they need. The challenge is getting it to work together. A company might use Google Ads to attract customers, Shopify to process orders, Klaviyo for email marketing and a CRM to manage relationships. Each platform collects information, but that doesn't necessarily mean the information is connected. Employees may still need to download reports, transfer leads between systems, update spreadsheets or manually compare campaign results against actual sales. Those disconnected processes can make marketing slower and more difficult to measure. Marketing engineering focuses on improving the connections between systems. When information moves reliably between platforms, businesses can reduce repetitive work and make decisions using more complete data. AI Search Is Changing How Businesses Get Discovered Technical marketing is also becoming more relevant as AI-powered search develops. Traditional search engine optimization focuses on helping websites appear in organic search results. But customers increasingly use AI-powered tools to research products, compare services and find answers. That has brought greater attention to two related concepts. Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) focuses on making information clear, accessible and useful for answer-based discovery. Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) focuses on improving how content can be discovered, understood and potentially referenced by generative AI systems. These approaches overlap with established SEO practices, including technically accessible websites, useful content and clear information architecture. They do not guarantee inclusion in AI-generated answers. For businesses, the practical lesson is that website content and technical structure need to support more than traditional search rankings. Automation Can Eliminate Repetitive Marketing Work Another opportunity is workflow automation. Marketing departments often spend considerable time on tasks that don't require much creative judgment. Downloading reports, updating spreadsheets, transferring customer information, preparing campaign summaries and moving data between applications are common examples. Many of these activities can be automated when systems are properly connected. That doesn't eliminate the need for marketers. It can give them more time to focus on strategy, creative development, customer relationships and improving campaign performance. The objective isn't to automate everything. It's to identify which tasks can be handled more reliably and efficiently through technology. Better Data Can Lead to Better Marketing Decisions One of the biggest challenges in marketing is understanding which activities actually contribute to revenue. A campaign might generate thousands of impressions, hundreds of clicks and dozens of leads without producing profitable customers. Marketing engineers can help businesses connect advertising activity with customer and sales information. That includes improving conversion tracking, integrating data sources and identifying where potential customers drop out of the buying process. The goal is to move beyond reporting what happened on an advertising platform and develop a clearer understanding of what happened across the business. Does Your Business Need a Marketing Engineer? Not every company needs to hire a full-time technical marketing specialist. For smaller businesses, the first step is identifying where disconnected systems, manual processes or unreliable data are creating problems. Consider whether your advertising and sales platforms share information, whether campaign performance can be connected to revenue and whether repetitive reporting tasks could be automated. It is also worth reviewing whether your website is technically accessible, well structured and capable of answering the questions potential customers are asking. Depending on the complexity of the business, these improvements might be handled by an internal employee, an outside specialist or a combination of both. The important decision isn't necessarily who to hire. It's determining which capabilities the business actually needs. The Future of Marketing Is More Connected Creative thinking, compelling messaging and customer relationships remain essential to effective marketing. But those strengths increasingly depend on the technology supporting them. Businesses need systems that communicate, data that can be trusted and processes that allow teams to work efficiently. Marketing engineering represents one approach to bringing those capabilities together. The next competitive advantage may not come from producing more content or launching more campaigns. It may come from building a marketing operation where everything works together.

P&G Rebuilt Its Operations and Saved $600 Million. Here's How.

October 23, 2026
Procter & Gamble didn't simply outsource its support operations. It first rebuilt how they worked, then brought in outside partners. By 2008, its business-services transformation had generated approximately $600 million in cumulative savings. In the late 1990s, Procter & Gamble faced a problem familiar to businesses of almost every size: too many teams performing similar work. Finance, human resources and other support functions were spread across different parts of the company. That meant duplicated activities, inconsistent processes and unnecessary costs. Instead of continuing to expand those departments independently, P&G decided to fundamentally change how its business operated. First, P&G Fixed Its Internal Operations In 1999, P&G began bringing its support functions into a single global organization. Over the following three years, the company consolidated and standardized more than 70 services. It also established shared-service centers to support operations around the world. The goal was to replace fragmented systems with a more consistent and efficient operating structure. Importantly, P&G didn't begin by handing all these functions to outside companies. It first reorganized how the work was performed internally. That foundation would make the next phase possible. Then Came $4.2 Billion in Outsourcing Agreements In 2003, P&G entered into outsourcing partnerships valued at approximately $4.2 billion. Outside specialists took responsibility for selected operations, including IT infrastructure, payroll support, accounts payable and facilities management. Rather than maintaining every capability internally, P&G could rely on partners with specialized expertise, established systems and the scale to manage these activities. But it didn't outsource everything. The company retained control of functions it considered strategically important, including procurement, logistics, IT architecture and technology-driven innovation. This distinction was central to the strategy. P&G wasn't trying to eliminate internal operations. It was deciding which activities made sense to manage itself and which could be handled more effectively by partners. The Benefits Went Beyond Cost Savings One of the clearest examples came during P&G's integration of Gillette. According to P&G's business-services leadership, its established systems and outsourcing partners helped the company mobilize approximately 750 additional people within weeks. The business-services integration was completed in 15 months, a process its leadership believed could otherwise have taken three to four years. That flexibility mattered. P&G could draw on existing capabilities and outside resources without having to build every part of the operation from scratch. By 2008, the company's broader business-services transformation had produced approximately $600 million in cumulative savings. Those savings came from a combination of internal consolidation, standardized processes and selective outsourcing, not outsourcing alone. What Smaller Businesses Can Learn Most businesses aren't managing P&G's scale or negotiating multibillion-dollar agreements. But the underlying decision is surprisingly relevant. As companies grow, they often add employees and departments without reconsidering how work gets done. Over time, the same problems can emerge: duplicated tasks, fragmented responsibilities, rising administrative costs and employees spending too much time on activities outside their core expertise. The first step isn't necessarily outsourcing. It's understanding the operation. Which processes are inefficient? Which functions require direct internal control? Which activities could a specialist handle more effectively? Customer support, bookkeeping, administrative work, creative production and certain technology operations may be candidates for outside support, depending on the business. But outsourcing a poorly defined process can simply transfer the problem to someone else. P&G's experience illustrates a more disciplined approach: improve the system, identify which capabilities are strategically important and use external partners where they offer a genuine advantage. You Don't Have to Build Everything In-House The most important lesson from P&G's transformation isn't that every business should outsource more. It's that growth doesn't require owning and managing every operational function. By combining stronger internal processes with carefully selected partners, businesses can reduce unnecessary complexity and concentrate their resources where they create the most value. Sometimes the smartest way to grow isn't to build another department. It's to rethink how the work gets done. Sources McKinsey & Company, From internal service provider to strategic partner: An interview with the head of Global Business Services at P&G (2008). Procter & Gamble, 2008 Annual Report.