I. Amazon Business Process
Emphasizing on customer centricity, Amazon optimizes all of their processes to make it easier for the customer to decide and buy the product, and to make it as cheap to the customers’ as possible.
There are multiple ways which Amazon makes the Business Process easier, faster, and more accessible to all of its customers.
Firstly, Amazon utilizes Amazon Web Services (AWS) to put their website in the cloud to optimize the speed of using the website. This greatly optimizes speed for both internal use, and also for customer use. Even customers wanting to rent the servers from the AWS can and they do find using this service is faster and much cheaper than setting up their own servers.
Secondly, according to Bezos, 53% of all Amazon’s shipped products weight five pounds or less, and therefore, Amazon is planning on launching the delivery drone which can carry such weight within 10 miles of their Fulfilment Centers (FCs), and should greatly increase customer satisfaction because of a great decrease in delivery time (30 minutes delivery time) (Amazon Web Services 2012).
Thirdly, Amazon’s automated recommendations formula helps customers decide what to buy. By utilizing Amazon’s IT, they were able to create the “item-to-item collaboration filtering”, which customizes each Amazon’s customer website in accordance to the customers tastes and preferences, which in other words: Amazon’s homepage is tailored to a customer based on certain criteria such as: 1) What the customer bought, and other customers who bought similar products in addition to that product. 2) What the customer viewed, and what similar products are viewed and purchased. 3) This allows filtering of unwanted items, which results in easier and fa...
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...ssion, they have four primary customer sets, which are: consumers, sellers, enterprises, and content creators. To elaborate, thinking long-term about customer centricity/focused and willingness to invent on their behalf is generally what Amazon does, and therefore, Bezos explains that Amazon maximizes the rate of experimentation, and simultaneously reducing the cost of experimentation, for a product that sells is a successful product, which is the result of conducting many experiments (HRH 2013).
In addition to offering a wide range of products, Amazon also offers certain services to specific customers to tailor to their needs, such as the Amazon Web Services (AWS) whereas enterprises and content creators can rest Amazon’s servers (10 cents per hour per server). This gives the customers great flexibility to be able to terminate the contact whenever they please.
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
Growth is core to Amazon.com's business strategy, and that has had a significant impact on the way they use technology: growth through more categories, a larger selection, more services, more buying customers, more sellers, more merchants, and more developers, increasing the different access methods, and expanding delivery mechanisms. The impact has been on many areas: larger data sets, faster update rates, more requests, more services, tighter SLAs (service-level agreements), more failures, more latency challenges, more service interdependencies, more developers, more documentation, more programs, more servers, more networks, more data centers. A large part of Amazon.com's technology evolution has been driven to enable this continuing growth, to be ultra-scalable while maintaining availability and performance.
In addition to Amazon great physical networking presence with all of their warehouses they also have a great delivery network that allows businesses to sell their goods through Amazon. Having many warehouses spread out helps getting products delivered quicker and cheaper than many smaller businesses can. Smaller businesses sell their goods via consignment with Amazon. Selling their goods using Amazons delivery and website services helps keep cost for small businesses down despite the fees paid to
From the consumer side, Amazon provides services like Amazon Prime, which delivers free two-day shipping on retail purchases, on-demand video streaming and a free access to the Kindle library, everything for an annual
There are many options that are provided by Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) like as follows: preconfigured software, complete environments, processors, and memory. Scalability is also offered on a pay as you go basis. The time required to implement a new server takes mire minutes, capacity can be scaled with ease. You will only have to pay for whatever you use when it comes to Amazon EC2. Application with fail proof safeguards can be developed with the use of Amazon EC2. (Amazon Web Services, 2012)
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).
Also, Amazon sells many products from many different brands and companies. The customers are most important to Amazon and Amazon knows that the delivery service is one thing that customers want the most. The way that Amazon fulfills the customer’s satisfaction of its delivery service is by having 55 fulfillment centers located in North America. Because fulfillment centers are not retail stores, Amazon products aren’t required to charge sale taxes. Along with the 53 fulfillment centers that Amazon has in North America, Amazon also has 53 distribution centers in Europe, Japan, Asia and India. Since Amazon has a lot of warehouses in many different locations, it can reach to its customers more conveniently. Amazon has been growing throughout the years has allowed its company to be able to reduce its costs. Besides being one of the top online shopping sites, Amazon has also developed the Kindle, which is now one of the most popular e-reader tablets out
One of the greatest opportunities for Amazon is an Online Payment System. The online system allows the company to reduce transaction fees and increase ease of use for their customers. Internet sales are increasing at a fast pace. This is a product of increased fuel prices, which make driving to a store less likely, and foreign purchases. This development allows foreign purchases to buy clothing as it becomes more popular abroad. Amazon’s biggest competitors can include retail stores that online stores such as Target, Best Buy, and Walmart among others, these can be considered the most dangerous for them since they have strong market share and can be a direct competitor since they attack the same market. Amazon wish to compete in prices, offering
In 1999 Bezos invested huge amounts of money to help Amazon become a more efficient company. He built warehouses in the United States to store inventory, in order to prevent under stocking during the holidays and also offer a greater selection of products that the companies distributors could not. Along with inventory, the company invested in logistics, such as controlling the supply chain through the same technology they used to create their unique website. Also they began to customize their website to individual customers. They stored information about the customers, which in turn made it easier for them to purchase goods on their website, which then reduced threat of the customer going to Amazon's competitors instead. Amazon wants the easiest and most enjoyable experience for customers when they visit the site. Bezos realized, that consumers need to have a good sense of security when purchasing products online, so the company invested in infrastructure and created an integrated system of customer service operations and payment processes.
Amazon.com creates value for its customers by offering customers broad array of products to select from through their website and ensuring timely delivery of products to exhibit high level of commitment towards their business and customers
Amazon model initially offered customers access to massive selection without the needs to incur cost, time and stress of opening warehouses and stores and the needs for inventory handling. Amazon realized to ensure customers get a pleasant experience and Amazon acquire its inventory at reasonable prices, they need to be in control of the transaction process from beginning to the end through operating the business from their own warehouses.
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 has recorded a magnificent success in its business throughout the years that it has been in operation. It has attracted almost all people to use it when necessary. Amazon has built its success in business methodically and slowly. Amazon has made much success because of its ability to read market trends and diversify its operations. It started as an online book selling company. However, it changed its operations and started selling other products. Currently, many large retail shops use Amazon to host and power their websites, for instance, sears and virgin megastores. Amazon now attracts over fifty million visitors in a period of one month. Amazon has tried to make their services fit each individual user. It has based its services on the end user. It has shipping discounts, customer product reviews and a credit card with bonuses. It also has prime membership, product forums and 1-click ordering system among other services. The company has tried to make a remarkable experience for customers and visitors (Thomas, 2006).
Technological factors. This is very important factor for Amazon therefore the success of the business depends on that. Amazon has to face a lot of technological challenges and to find a way to be ahead of the competitors.
Jeffrey Bezos, the founder and current CEO of Amazon.com, initially started the company as an online bookstore in 1994. Within several months, Amazon spread its operation to all 50 states and abroad. Presently, customers from over 45 countries buy at Amazon. Over a short period of time, the company expanded sales to electronics, video games, software, CDs, DVDs, MP3 downloads, food, furniture, apparel, jewelry, and toys. Today, the company even produces its own products such as the Kindle series. Also, Amazon.com is one of the major providers of cloud computing services. Currently, the company is the largest global online retailer responsible for 20% of online retail market share.