CHAPTER 2 Digital Upstarts Vanquished Consumer Giants

Of the more than ten thousand products Amazon sells every minute, as many as half of the sales are based on personalized recommendations. Its algorithms arrange the products you see when you visit the site, narrowing them down from about 353 million items, using its ability to predict what you may want at that precise moment. It’s as if you walked into a store in Diagon Alley with Harry Potter, and the shelves magically rearranged themselves so that the products you’re most likely to buy are closest to you—and the rest recede into the background. It would be impossible to do that in a physical store.

Over the last two decades, Amazon has connected people’s purchase histories with their ...

Get Fusion Strategy now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.