Building a Strategy for Amazon in Sweden and Denmark: Managing Strategy Paradoxes to Create Competitive Advantage

Abstract

This master’s thesis investigated how Amazon can establish a sustainable competitive advantage in Denmark and Sweden through a platform-based view combined with strategy paradox management approaches. The thesis employed a case study design with a mixed-methods approach to collect primary data from a customer survey and semi-structured expert interviews, and secondary data to analyse Amazon’s external and internal forces in Sweden and Denmark per 2025. Global e-commerce platforms that expand internationally must manage paradoxes to establish a sustainable competitive advantage. This thesis focusses on three essential paradoxes, which include (1) globalisation vs. localisation, (2) markets vs. resources, and (3) competition vs. cooperation. To establish a sustainable competitive advantage in Sweden and Denmark, the master’s thesis concludes that Amazon needs to maintain worldwide scale while localising key aspects and utilise internal resources and capabilities (such as Prime and AI) to meet Swedish and Danish market expectations while managing the competition vs. cooperation paradox with local sellers. Since its launch in 2020, Amazon.se has become the leading e-commerce platform in Sweden by gross merchandise value. Now Amazon needs to build long-term customer loyalty and behavioural retention. The Danish market remains a pre-entry market and network effects have not yet been activated. In Denmark, Amazon needs to manage the chicken-and-egg paradox while reaching critical mass and establishing local legitimacy to successfully overcome liability of outsidership. The thesis presents a sustainable competitive advantage framework for Amazon through the application of Wit and Meyer’s (2014) paradox management strategies which include balancing, navigating, parallel process, juxtaposing, embracing and resolving. The study faces two main limitations due to its small survey participant count and restricted number of interviewed subjects which creates opportunities for future research in comparable markets.