Analyzing the Top 10 for E-Commerce

Most will use one of the three, the fun part is to combine them but most do not have access to the knowledge or technology. To compete against the big brands in mass market products you need to do what they do - there are exceptions but we'll skip those for the moment.

The principle is that you cannot beat them, but you can take a small percentage of their revenue which is a large number. To do those you need to understand revenue:effort models, organic visitors per $1 models, and the most important - how to exude trust.

You can find niche markets to make enough to survive (1:1 revenue:effort), you can spend some years learninig seo using linear progression, but to compete directly with the top companies you need access to their technology which reduces workload and increases exposure by 80-95%.

Now, we actually have access to this technology that can take a 1mil product store live in 1mth for example, the consultants/venture capitalists are starting up their own retailers but have been selectively open to third party business ventures proposals - so far nothing turned up worthwhile.

So it really depends, how far can you see your future and how much determination do you have. You can start with the ususal suspects, Shopify/WooCommerce/Magento but that needs a linear progression over multiple years with the first years being very very slow - most give up at this point.

Can you do it any one of the ways, absolutely yes, but they will take time. Can you do it quicker, yes 5-10x, but that requires access to the multi-national technology as they have 7-10yr cycles -or- many many years of experience in a sector that you can use your knowledge assuming no fundamentals have changed. The problem with the latter is that it is generally not tranferable to other sectors and requires people willing to part with that knowledge in a way that speeds it up for you - that is very very unlikely.

Ultimately everyone wants something from the equation, otherwise you have to do it all yourself.