Case Study of “Bookoff, Amazon Japan, and the Japanese Retail Bookselling Industry”
1. The reasons for the profitability of large Japanese retail booksellers relatively poor and their scale relatively small.
One reason for this is that there is no significant industry consolidation has occurred, so there is no dominant bookseller, because there is a unique formal institution which is price-fixing system that makes it illegal for larger and potentially more efficient competitors to use price competition to drive out small competitors. Laws have allowed publishers to fix the price of new books, music, and newspapers in the bookselling industry, this means retailers are unable to compete on price. For a long time, sales has been in …show more content…

In addition, Bookoff focuses on the used book and differentiates itself by shaping the new recycle industry, the students can feel frugal and environmentally conscious without suffering a drop-off in the quality of books when buying new-used ones, and new-used book store such as Bookoff is also an acceptable compromise for the still image-conscious, but increasingly thrifty, Japanese consumer.
For Amazon Japan, first, it uses product differentiation strategy to provide a wide variety of products besides book. It offers music, DVDs, videos, software, gaming and even kitchen appliances. By offering the wide range of products, Amazon Japan differentiates itself by offering larger selection of products. Also, it differs itself by allowing customers to read excerpts and passages from books before they purchase them. Low cost leadership strategy is also deployed to compete with existing competitors by offering free shipping which put Amazon on par with its bricks and mortar competitors but give it an advantage over other online stores. • Resource-based view.
Bookoff has several new technologies as tangible resource and has intangible resource as reputation for offering new used books. These new technologies can add value to those used books, Boooff can clean book covers and grind down dog-eared pages to make a used book look practically new. And the value-adding activity is very firm-specific, so, the technology resource is