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Would Amazon.com achieve its aggressive goal of becoming cash flow positive by the end of 2001?
Despite an increasing customer-base, recognizable brand, and innovative business model concept, Amazon.com found itself unable to achieve profitability. Faced with the threat of bankruptcy, Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos was convinced his e-retailing company would turn a profit by the end of 2001. Understanding the challenges ahead, Bezos’s aggressive leadership positioned the company for future success based on several key factors including: the company’s upward trend in net sales, strategic business partnerships, and IT-based proprietary assets.
From 1997 to 2000, Amazon experienced positive growth in net sales, making this upward trend likely to continue on into 2001. While operating expenses in fulfillment, marketing and technology also increased, these expenses were necessary to solidify Amazon’s opportunity for future growth and profitability. In 1998 and 1999, Amazon “spent over $429M to build a state-of-the-art digital business infrastructure and operations that linked nine distribution centers and six customer service centers located across the United States, Europe, and Asia” (Applegate, 2009, para. 1). This strategic expense in technology and restructuring suggests that future operating costs would likely level-off and the company would eventually cross over to begin making a profit.
In 2000, Amazon announced its partnership with Toys “R” Us, Inc. This strategic partnership enabled Amazon to use its retailing technology to build and host the Toys “R” Us online store alongside its state-of-the-art digital distribution and customer service centers it purchased in 1998-1999 (Applegate, 2009, para. 1). This partnershi...
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...s infrastructure the company could create and sustain value overtime.
Works Cited
Applegate, L., Austin, R. and Soule, D. (2009). Corporate information strategy and management: Text and cases. 8th ed. Boston: McGraw Hill, 2009.
Can Amazon Make It? (2000, July). Retrieved from Bloomburg Businessweek: http://www.businessweek.com/printer/articles/75604-can-amazon-make-it?type=old_article Retrieved online: March 5, 2014.
Lambeth, J. (2002, January 23). Amazon turns a page with first ever profit. Retrieved from The Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/3293111/Amazon-turns-a-page-with-first-ever-profit.html Retrieved online: March 5, 2014.
Lashinsky, A. (2012, November 16). Amazon's Jeff Bezos: The ultimate disrupter. Retrieved from Fortune & Money: CNN Money: http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2012/11/16/jeff-bezos-amazon/ Retrieved online: March 5, 2014.
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...
Bezos believes in the value of customer satisfaction and this is the Amazon.com main objective. A huge number of measurable goals are used to track the rate of how Amazon performs and wishes to perform. Not surprisingly, an astonishing eighty percent of those goals are related to the satisfaction of the customer. Bezos primarily concern is improving the performance of the organization and customer service. Personnel issues are given secondary importance and attention. As Stone has emphasized (2013), Kim Rachmeler , who worked for Amazon.com for more than a decade, affirm that “This is not somebody who takes pleasure at tearing someone a new a--hole. He is not that kind of person. Jeff doesn’t tolerate
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.
Both companies will face challenges, however. For Amazon.com, the test will be to make sure its complex fulfillment systems integrate seamlessly with Toysrus.com's. The eTailer must also coordinate the tricky placement of products in distribution centers to avoid cost overruns. Toysrus.com is faced with finding the right balance between supplying Toys "R" Us stores and the web site with "hot" toys, so as not to disappoint customers. Furthermore, to make orders profitable, it must get people to buy multiple products.
Jeff Bezo’s began Amazon in his garage in July 1995 with three Sun workstations setting on wooden doors for tables and extension cords running from everywhere (Academy of Achievement, 2010). Right from the beginning he was a visionary leaving his well paying job as a senior vice president with D. E. Shaw to begin Amazon.com (Academy of Achievement, 2010). Being the visionary that he is he saw an opportunity prompted by the huge growth rate of internet use in a single year and ran with it never looking back. Jeff realized that the internet had “no real commerce to speak of” so he began researching possible businesses (Academy of Achievement, 2010). “After reviewing 20 mail order businesses and deciding which could be conducted more efficiently over the internet than by traditional means he decided on books” (Academy of Achievement, 2010). He thought books were perfect because attempting to send huge catalogs for all the available books would be expensive and cumbersome, but an online resource database that was easy to navigate would provide customers with easy access and a single point from which to shop. “In 30 days, with no press, Amazon had sold books in all 50 states and 45 foreign countries, obviously by the success of Amazon he was right (Academy of Achievement, 2010). In a case study written by Javad Kargar called “Amazon.com in 2003” he stated that “Amazon's online store was a big hit, with about $5 million in the first year of operations” (2004). This huge success so quickly would have confirmed for Jeff that his idea was viable and drove him to continue to strive for more. Jeff Bezo’s charismatic-visionary leadership is the key to his and Amazon’s success.
Although Amazon has been active trying to find the perfect strategy to make profits, the numbers in its financial statements had not shown the most optimal results. We have discuss that even though its strategies have been right according to supply chain and logistics methodologies and theory, something had been missing to represent this successful strategies into financial results. It is seen that Amazon had spent too long time finding the right strategy which the last might be the one because in the financial statements profits started to come up. Amazon still have a long way to go to mature its strategy and represents it into profits for its shareholders.
Launched by Jeff Bezos, the Amazon.com website started in 1995 and is today considered as one of the most prominent retail website on the internet with a record turnover of US$ 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
E-commerce is among the top ways people are buying and selling goods these days. And when a person goes to shop online for the best deal, it is almost without a doubt they will peruse the hundreds of thousands of bottom shelf priced items on Amazon.com. Amazon.com is known for their wide assortment of products and brands as well as fast shipping. But what else is really keeping amazon.com alive? I believe a solution may be to create a physical presence in addition to their online presence, perhaps creating another brand that is openly owned and operated by Amazon.com or offering more services along with product sales to keep customers coming back. In
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 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).
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.