Two Retail Veterans Take Aim at Amazon’s E-Commerce Reign

There are two ways for startups to take on Amazon.com, the reigning monarch of American online shopping. One is to mount a frontal attack: raise hundreds of millions of dollars from investors, build huge warehouses and a complex delivery infrastructure, establish deals with thousands of merchant partners, and aim, through sheer brute force, to compete with Jeff Bezos' behemoth on the very qualities that have made Amazon peerless — selection, speed, customer friendliness and price. The other way is to do something out of left field.