Preço, não é para quem quer

"Most people just look at a company's margins and judge the quality of the business model based on that, but the cash flow characteristics of the business can make one company a far more valuable company than another with the exact same operating margin. Amazon could have had a margin of zero and still made money.
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At Amazon we were ruthlessly focused on squeezing efficiency out of every part of the business, especially the variable ones that affected every purchase.
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You can choose to leverage that strength in two ways. One is you match your competitor on pricing and just earn higher margins. But the other, the way Amazon has always tended to favor, is to lower prices, to thin the oxygen for your competitors.
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If you have bigger lungs than your competitor, all things being equal, force them to compete in a contest where oxygen is the crucial limiter. If your opponent can't swim, you make them compete in water. If they dislike the cold, set the contest in the winter, on a tundra. You can romanticize all of this by quoting Sun Tzu, but it's just common sense.
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Another advantage to low margin models is increased customer loyalty. Most of the products Amazon sells are commodity items. It's not like buying one brand of car versus another, where you a variety of subjective judgements affect the consumer's choice. The Avengers Blu-ray disc you buy from Amazon is the same one you'll find at Wal-Mart or Best Buy. In that world, the lowest price tends to win. (Moi ici: Voltar ao parágrafo anterior, se não se pode competir pelo preço, competir pela subjectividade, pela exclusividade, pela experiência) In the early years, Amazon routinely lowered either product pricing or shipping pricing. Very few companies lower their prices permanently as time goes by except on depreciating goods, like computers whose value decreases as newer, faster models hit the market.
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If you're the low-cost leader, customers will forgive a lot of sins. That margin of error, like the competitive moat, buys you peace of mind."

Recordar a sequência final de "Preços baixos".

Trechos retirados de "Amazon, Apple, and the beauty of low margins — Remains of the Day"

BTW:

"Given Amazon is still scaling aggressively, I anticipate this cost advantage to increase overtime. Looking at the latest four years of financial data in Google Finance, Amazon’s revenues are growing at a 25.85% CAGR. This contrasts with 8.54% for Costco and 2.54% for Wal-Mart."

Trecho retirado de "Amazon is Pursuing a Cost Advantage, Not Low Margins"