Funny that you mention pizza, since I suspect online retail competition will increasingly resemble the competition among pizza delivery places in dense, competitive markets (like college towns).
In those settings, the pizza parlors generally do everything they can to make comparing prices more trouble than it is worth for a relatively low priced class of products.
For example, when I was in college, there were about half a dozen pizza places which served our apartment. The pricing was set up to discourage buying, say, a single two-topping pizza. Instead, each one offered various bundles of pizza, toppings, soft drinks, garlic bread, frequent-buyer points, etc., which were a) great deals; and b) dissimilar enough to lead people to focus on criteria other than price.
Obviously, this doesn't work very well when it comes to the consumer who goes online looking for a specific, single item, but I Amazon's average transaction size so far suggests that most purchases don't fit this description.
I do, incidentally, think that there is a price differential at which all the frequent-buyer clubs and bundling gimmicks won't make any difference. Longs have to buy the notion that Amazon will have a lean enough supply and distribution system to pass the laugh-test on prices. I also think Amazon has to stick with relatively low-priced classes of products--books, cds, etc. |
