Otto, founded in 1949 is one of the largest ecommerce retailers in the world and one of the few who can compete with Amazon in Europe. A retailer in their own right.
Otto started off as a mail order business for shoes, but today is one of the biggest online marketplaces in the world. AS far back as 1995 they put their entire catalogue online even though there were only around 250,000 Germans with an Internet connection. Otto have grown up with the Internet and are along with eBay and Amazon one of the few businesses around at the start of the Internet age who are still online today.
It’s interesting to note the number of High Street retailers and mail order companies who have touted their transformation programs over the past few years, most of whom are still in the early stages of their transformation. The many competitors who believe that you can move from a traditional retail model to a digital model in just two or three years but a large number of businesses have failed to do this. A couple of years is too short a time and many businesses have left it too late to fully embrace the Internet.
In the UK we’ve seen Debenhams and House of Fraser as just two recent examples of well established traditional businesses who have failed to transform to digital models, hamstrung by their expensive real estate of high street stores. Staples is another, although they split their digital and retail businesses and now Office Outlet (previously Staples retail stores) has also called in administrators but the split has kept the online Staples business alive.
Otto also has a high bar for merchants – you won’t find a Chinese seller not paying VAT on Otto and neither will you find cheap knock offs. Otto is a premium platform with high standards and consider themselves to be the only alternative to Amazon in Europe.
Finally we often think of Amazon Logistics as being a novel idea, who’d have thought of a retailer setting up their own delivery operations. Otto beat Amazon by several decades as they have had their own delivery company since 1972 – you’ve probably heard of them as they are called Hermes and nowadays also deliver for many other businesses… including Amazon.
