The coastal city of Seattle Washington, which is appropriately nicknamed “The Emerald City”, is proudly regarded to as home sweet home to hundreds of thousands of American citizens. In addition to being home to many everyday individuals from all walks of life, the city is also the origin of a rather large amount of world-renowned famous figures such as a wide array of musicians, Starbucks, Nordstrom, MLB's Seattle Mariners, and of course the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks. However, the average person would not guess that the figure that has, as of recent years, really placed the landmark city in front of the world’s spotlight is online retailer Amazon.com. “What makes Amazon such a big deal”, you may ask? Well, the company has been named and recognized over the last couple of years as not just the nation’s number one online retailer but also “the biggest online store on the planet” (O'Connor).
Amazon, which is headquartered in the city’s South Lake Union neighborhood, was started from the ground up in 1994 by Jeff Bezos a very intelligent internet entrepreneur and investor. Bezos envisioned his company to have a somewhat mass market appeal here in the U.S. instead of aiming to cater to a specific market niche. For instance, nearly all internet users are included in their target market as long as they have access to the internet, a device that is capable of accessing the internet (computer, smart phone, or tablet), and a credit card or debit card. They have combined this very impressive marketing plan with their website’s offering up of a large selection of products and an almost equal amount of sellers operating as partners or 3rd party affiliates. All of this has helped provide the company with a good amount of points of differences...
... middle of paper ...
...dies the very essence of marketing. They have successfully begun to bridge the gap between the many wants and needs of the millions of shoppers’ who visit their website from all over the globe by providing a readily accessible avenue or outlet to fulfill them. On their part, for their efforts, they have been able to meet various marketing goals and have triumphed more than the competing firms within their industry could ever dream of. Of course, this point could not have been reached without Amazon’s effective blending together of site simplicity, a large array of product offerings, and an ever increasing focus on satisfying the customer. Through these various points of differences, they have gained both a massive competitive advantage and also a host of rabid fans. Amazon has indeed established their brand as a menacing figure within the retail industry as a whole.
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.
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
Since the creation of Amazon in 1995, it has been a reference of adopting a successful strategy which has preserved over time; being the largest online store in the world nowadays. In addition, i...
Another part of Amazon’s retail strategy is to serve as the channel for other retailers to sell their products and take a percentage of cut of every purchase. Amazon does not have to maintain inventory on slower-selling products. This strategy has made Amazon a ‘long tail’ leading retailer, expanding its available selection without a corresponding increase in overhead costs.
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
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 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’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).
Amazon is the world’s largest retailer online. Founded in 1994 it has started as an online bookstore but soon expends its catalog with software, video games, electronics, furniture, food, toys etc.
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.