Amazon.com, Inc.

One of the fastest growing businesses in retail that has become famous and renowned is Amazon.com. More than anywhere in the world, Amazon has proven its strong dominance over all other retailers with a five year annual retail sales growth close to 20.8%.

This was sustained through their e-commerce retailing, diversifying into a multitude of different products and innovating their overhead costs and methods of sale and delivery. What this lead to was, in the 2015 financial year Amazon managed to achieve $79.3 billion in retail sales.

Initially Amazon focused only on the electronic, primarily with core products such as DVDs, CDs and books. This allowed Amazon to grow, but the predominate reason why Amazon has grown into such a giant was their expansion into online groceries, cloud computing and film and TV production.

At its peak Amazon did not hold back and spent billions without second thought into infrastructure and technology to fully develop and optimise the capabilities of Amazon. This allowed Amazon to develop and construct an inconceivable amount of warehouses where they could conduct shipping. Their shipping capabilities developed from 48 hours, to even same day delivery.

By tying such extreme shipping with free shipping through their Amazon Prime paid subscription, customers would consistently return to Amazon for all of their purchases.

Apple

A well-recognised and infamously fast growing retailer is Apple’s retail stores. In the past 5 years, Apple is able to boast an annual retail sales growth of 23.4%. Their retail stores are a chain operated by Apple Inc., each designed and created with a very sleek and innovative design that screams the qualities of Apple. These stores market and sell the accessories and products of Apple, leading them to produce retail sales of $28 billion in the financial year 2015.

What Apple succeeded in that so many technological giants fail to even do is marketing. Apple was able to demonstrate their products were a luxury, a status symbol, and a social necessity that each consumer could purchase and hold. What this created was the perception of high demand, making their customers feels as if there was a sense of urgency when considering and purchasing apple products.

Similarly, the regular appearance of Apple products in the daily lives of people, both physically and through their other media such as television leads to a great familiarity of Apple. Coupled with the ease of access, extremely simple and innovative design of Apple products for the average consumer meant they were able to appeal to a large audience.

Once you begin using an Apple product, it is hard to forgo such familiarity and ever switch products again. These factors are what enabled Apple to become one of the fast growing businesses in retail.

Vipshop Holdings

The fastest growing business in retail has to be Vipshop Holdings in China. Over the past 5 years, it has held an annual retail sales growth of 184.6%. Vipshop is a leader for online discount retailers, selling high quality products yet at affordable prices for its customers.

For the financial year in 2015, Vipshop managed retail sales of $6.1 billion.

You might wonder how one business can be so successful. Vipshop managed to take advantage and successfully branch its e-commerce space.

It dominates the market in China by offering the largest and most flash sales available which is able to encapsulate much of the population in China. At the same, these flash sales allow Vipshop to clear its inventory due to its optimal inventory management.

In theory, as Vipshop growth is primary sourced from its ability to conduct flash sales, as long as they are able to buy their products in bulk and sell those products at a discount price due to the savings they make from bulk purchases, they will be able to profit.

This kind of mentality is only successful with proactive customers using the website. Vipshop prides itself in its ability to retain its customers once they purchase. In 2012, Vipshop sales almost tripled to $692 million, highlighting their potential for growth.