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What are the chief elements of Amazon’s overall competitive strategy? How well do the pieces fit together? Is the strategy still evolving
A brief history of Amazon Inc
What are the chief elements of Amazon’s overall competitive strategy? How well do the pieces fit together? Is the strategy evolving
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Amazon.com Case Analysis
Internal & External Matrix, Matrix Analysis and TOWS Summary, and Quantitative Strategic Planning Matrix
Executive Summary
This case analysis serves the purpose to provide an analytical framework to evaluate Amazon.com from an internal and external perspective, and to provide strategic direction based upon the internal and external evaluation. The case will begin with an introduction to Amazon.com.
Introduction/Background
Jeffrey Bezos, formerly a senior vice president for D. E. Shaw & Company, founded Amazon.com in 1994. D. E. Shaw is a Wall Street-based investment bank, and Mr. Bezos was assigned to find good Internet companies in which to invest. During the summer of 1994, he stumbled across a Web site that showed the number of Internet users was growing by 2,300 percent per month. He quickly realized the vast potential of the Internet, and began putting together a list of possible products that he could sell on the World Wide Web. He eventually narrowed his list to music products and books. Although music products and books both had enormous potential, he eventually selected books because he believed that he could compete more evenly in the book segment due to the lack of a very dominant player. "In contrast, the music industry had only six major record companies. These companies controlled the distribution of records and CDs and, therefore, had the potential to lock out a new business threatening the traditional record-store format" (Kotha, p.11).
To begin his new venture, Mr. Bezos left New York and moved to Seattle. He decided to move to Seattle for two reasons: 1) Ingram Book Group's warehouse is located near Seattle; and 2) Because of the Seattle area's reputation for computer expertise. In 1995, Amazon began selling books entirely online, operating out of a rented facility and using doors laid across sawhorses for desks. He soon was able to generate several million dollars from venture capitalists, and sales were astounding. Sales for 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998 and 1999 were $0.5, $16, $147, $610 and $1,640 million respectively.
Amazon's customer base has increased dramatically from 180,000 in 100 countries in 1996 to 12 million in 160 countries by mid-1999. In 1998, Amazon began to expand into other product categories. The Company began to sell music products and videos, and within two months o...
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...fries & Company, Inc. April 12, 2001; pages 1-16.
"Market Guide - Comparisons for amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN)." http://yahoo.marketguide.com/mgi/ratio/A13EF.html ; pages 1-5. Author unknown.
Lund, Brian. "eBay vs. Amazon" The Motley Fool. April 3, 2001. http://www.fool.com/portfolios/rulebreaker/2001/rulebreaker010403.htm ; pages 1-4.
Becker, Holly, Gross, Michael and Leichter, Stephanie. "Amazon.com Inc.: Amazon's International Challenges." Lehman Brothers Global Equity Research. May 3, 2001; pages 1-16.
The Economist (1997a). "A Survey of Electronic Commerce." May 10; pages 1-18. Author unknown. Taken from above Kotha essay.
The Wall Street Journal (1996). "Reading the Market: How a Wall-Street Whiz Found a Niche Selling Books on the Internet." May 16; page 1. Author unknown. Taken from above Kotha essay.
Eads, Stefani. "Why Amazon's Board is Part of the Problem." BusinessWeek online. http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/apr2001/nf2001044_127.htm ; April 4, 2001, pages 1-5.
Junnarkar, Sandeep. "Shares of Amazon Hit on "Underperform" Rating." c|net News.com. http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1007-200-2478430.html ; August 9, 2000, pages 1-3.
History”, n.d.). But the unbelievable pace at which Amazon added new products and new customers proved to be a formidable barrier for any competitors. Within the first 10 years Amazon accomplished an unbelievable feat; it had 49 million customers and 6.9 billion dollars in revenue, and it had done so by selling some products at a loss to build market share (Rivlin, 2005). At times it was difficult leveraging so much capital to grow market share, but Jeff Bezos’ focus on the customer and long term growth of the company proved to be the real reason Amazon didn’t fall prey to the .com bust like so many other internet
Amazon.com’s US operation business model is based on “sell all, carry few”. Amazon offers consumers a wide selection of products while keeping inventories at low levels. A major interest for Amazon in the US is optimization of netwo...
Amazon.com operates in the Online Retail Industry. The sector is one of the fastest growing globally and is outperforming the ordinary retail marketplace. It was created after 1995 and it was only the Internet that made it possible for such an industry not only to be established but to become one of the most flourishing sectors in the business environment. What is interesting is that Amazon.com, together with eBay is the pioneer in the field. Both companies were launched in 1995 and are still extremely successful. The creation of e-mail in 1996 had a huge impact on the development of online retail by introducing a fast and easy way to communicate with customers. For this two-year period Internet usage doubled annually, thus, allowing for the expansion of the industry. Google is launched a year later, in 1998, only to become the most used search engine in the world and an essential partner for the online retailers by helping them tailor their websites to customer’s personal preferences and by advertising. After that, more and more people see the opportunity in the growing industry and enter it. By 2001 there are more than 513 million Internet users globally, which calls for action in terms of creating regulations and laws to protect the users and personal property. In 2003, Apple launches iTunes, and provides a platform for low-cost digital downloads. Another major change is the appearance of social media from 2004, which is one of the biggest influencer on the state of the industry. With the launch of iPhone in 2007, this trend strengthens as people get to enjoy the Internet anywhere they want to. From then on, technological advancements have made it extremely easy and fun to shop online, making it ...
Treanor, T.. (2010). Amazon: Love Them? Hate Them? Let's Follow the Money. Publishing Research Quarterly, 26(2), 119-128. Retrieved February 24, 2012, from ABI/INFORM Trade & Industry. (Document ID: 2377177581).
Amazon’s macro-environment is made up of six external factors: political, economic, environmental, technological, social, and legal conditions. These factors are important because they shape how the company operates and you must know each piece to be able to compete within the retail and eCommerce industry. An evolving political factor are the efforts the government has made toward punishing offenders of cyber-crime. This kind of thief wasn’t walking into your store, but hacking into your computer. This type of crime wasn’t possible before the internet. The government has started to take these crimes more serious as technology evolves. Technology is a factor that Amazon.com must invest heavily in. They are reliant on having top of the line technology to survive against cyber-crime and to stay relevant in the tech world. ECommerce is everywhere now and competition is very high. This brings in legal conditions; Amazon must know what laws exist in which countries because they are a
Amazon is the biggest online store in the world; since its creation in 1995, Amazon has adopted improvements throughout its processes changing considerately. This reports describes the changes adopted by Amazon. In addition, this report generates a diagnosis of each step and makes a deep analysis of the decision makings by amazon based on three specific topic; 1) when Amazon managed inventory internally; 2) when Amazon decided to outsource inventory management and lastly when amazon decided to sell products of competing retailers on its site.
Launched by Jeff Bezos, the Amazon.com website started in 1995 and is today considered as one of the most prominent retail website on the internet with a record turnover of US$ 14.87 billion in 2007. Jeff Bezos’s intention was to create an internet based company with the most dedicated product portfolio on the internet where customers could find anything they might want. Amazon’s success is based on technology, services and products (Jens et al., 2003).
When Amazon.com first began in 1995, as strictly a book retailer, Bezos knew he had discovered an excellent company. After all, a physical bookstore cannot stock anywhere close to the number of books Amazon can offer online. Within a year, the company had a customer base of approximately 340,000 consumers and daily site visits were huge as well. But Bezos wanted to expand the company to offer music and DVDs, because he realized there was little or no barrier of entry. In the next years Amazon would emerge as a marketplace, expanding the company globally offering products from toys to kitchenware. Because of the relatively cheap prices Amazon was offering and also the growing number of online shoppers, the company was doing tremendous amounts of sales and creating profits.
Amazon.com was a venture into an emerging market of internet and had to face hidden and unexpected hurdles in order to survive and excel in the market. Therefore, Amazon.com kept modifying its strategies with their focus on enhancing customer experience of online shopping and to delivery exceptional services with complete convenience to their customers. One of the major strategic decisions was to compromise on cost saving stragegy when Amazon.com started to maintain its own warehouses in different countries in order to ensure timely and accurate delivery to their customers
Looking at Bezos’s business model from an entrepreneurial standpoint is very interesting. He decided to take a very unique approach to business and in doing so he took some big risks to get where he is today. For a company like Amazon that is constantly pushing the boundaries and moving into new territory one could do a SWAT analysis for nearly every year they have been in business and it would look drastically different. For now I want to retrospectively focus on the initial plan that Bezos laid out and strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that came with it.
Amazon’s also tried to spearhead the industry by introducing the customer-pleasing traits in terms of the technology, order fulfillment and retailing strategies categori...
Amazon is best known for their kindle, fast shipping, and selling various products (Smith). With Amazon being such a large corporation, professionalism, academics, character, and engagement are crucial parts of the success of the company. Professionalism: Amazon has grown to become the largest internet-based retailer in the world by total sales. It began as primarily an online bookstore and soon began to sell more and more electronics and then over time began to sell pretty much anything. In 1998, Amazon earned about $0.6 billion, which held steady growth from 1998-2006 (“Amazon.com”).
.... Amazon uses the internet to allow customers to make content searches, for instance inside books. In addition it has used e-commerce to enable customers to buy online access to certain books through its upgrade program (Webanalyticsbook.com, 2007).
Legal Factors: Amazon is following legislative constraints and changes, such as health and safety legislation. Using a range of tools and techniques helps companies make fast decisions and remain competitive in the market. Here, we will examine some of the tools used by our chosen company: SWOT analysis, PESTLE analysis, and Porter's Five Forces analysis. As we can see, the SWOT analysis is an analysis of the micro-environment of the company, while PESTLE and Porter's Five analyses are from the macro-environment of our company. These analyses help the company be aware of the market, competition, and threats to the business.
Eule, A. (2013). It’s time for Amazon to open its black box. Barron’s, 93(42), 37.