What Amazon’s Launch in Sweden Will Teach You About Shipping Products
How Amazon uses the “F*ck It. Ship It” Principle.
Amazon recently launched its Swedish site amazon.se. This is their first venture into the nordic market. Swedes have had to rely on the German or British Amazon up until now. This might come as a surprise to you as Sweden is a big market based on our GDP so you’d expect Amazon to have been established here already. Sweden is one of the few western countries where people have lived a life without the presence of an e-commerce tech giant like Amazon.
I can’t speak for what living a life with Amazon is like yet but I will be able to soon! What I can say though is that this is going to be an interesting time going forward, seeing how Amazon adapts to the existing Swedish e-commerce scene.
“F**k It. Ship it.”
Let me tell you something about their launch today. It wasn’t as grandiose and spectacular as people had expected. You’d expect something more than a press release from Amazon right? With their silent launch, there has been a lot of mistakes discovered on the site. Hundreds if not thousands of products have titles and descriptions which have been directly translated by a computer.
Examples of such mistakes are product titles that have been translated into a horrendous Swedish version:
Another thing is that there isn’t any Amazon Prime membership or Amazon Alexa sold. Those are two of Amazon’s core products, especially the Prime next-day shipping. That is one of their core benefits. What will set them apart on the Swedish market if they can’t offer anything other than existing Swedish online retailers.
This just goes to show how Amazon prioritizes launching over having a perfect product with everything finished and free of error. They know that they can fix these things later as they are minor things. By all means, is this also a good way of generating press and traffic towards the new site as people talk and write about Amazon’s mishappenings.
With this said, you can most often ship your products and services much sooner than you think. We often get stuck and delay the last 20% of the development. Adopt the “Fuck It. Ship It” mindset like Amazon and see how your products thrive. Customers love the feeling of being part of something new and being able to contribute to improvement. Those types of customers are the best customers. They are the ones that will stay loyal to your product no matter what.
Shipping your products early also ensures that you don’t spend too much time and effort focusing on the wrong thing. It will allow you to gather feedback and data so that you can focus on the important features.
Don’t get hung up on the small stuff.
Fuck it. Ship it.
