I believe it's more their range that is being compared to Amazon. I am very impressed with the range, but unless they lower their prices I don't see them being overly competitive (at least in the electronics market).
The point about the vendor accounts was that the site is nothing like Amazon
Is the community in need of an vendor-driven store? Doesn't Coingig fill this role?
At this stage I don't think so. The bitcoin community is incredibly tech savvy. If a user has a constant supply of products to sell I very much doubt they would prefer to pay Coingig a 2.5% fee for each sale rather than set up their own website. It is incredibly easy to set up a webstore and it is incredibly easy to accept bitcoins as payment. Unless we are getting some serious exposure it honestly is not worth the hassle in my opinion (especially if you have 1000s of products like we do).
Services like Coingig are great to launch a fresh website, but as a standalone service I don't think there's a lot of room for growth in the short term. I'd love to be proved wrong but I just can't see it happening until the bitcoin economy grows to be more accepted.