Amazon

Amazon Introduction/History

Amazon.com is the world’s largest online retailer with nearly $15 billion in annual sales in 2007, stands today as one of the ionic online seller of the modern era. Jeffery P. Bezos, a former financial analyst for the New York hedge fund D.E. SHAW & COMPANY, founded it in 1994. He was on a drive form Texas to Seattle with his wife, writing an ambitious business plan for an online bookstore along the way. Amazon was initially launched as an online bookstore, but soon Amazon expanded from one product category to another: CDs, movies, and toys, furniture in short, and eventually ranged to everything from toys to kitchen supply. Amazon’s overall reputation for good price, broad selection and convenience has grown trust in e-commerce throughout the globe.

Strategy and Success

Amazon strategy was quite unusual. They didn’t expect any profit for the first five years. This is because they believed in achieving their non-monetary goals. Their internal target was stakeholders and their external target was customers and investors.

The most important thing in their strategic planning has been that of identifying company goals and maintaining balance between their skills and resources. Some of the underlying objectives of Amazon are:

Growth – As just mentioned Amazon started out, as an online bookstore only but very soon became an A to Z store, and is still growing by selling their web space to other smaller companies. They receive a 10 percent bonus for items sold by those companies through Amazon.com web page. According to CEO Jeff Bezos the company doesn’t want to expand to physical stores.

Competitive position – Amazon has positioned itself as the unquestionable leader of online retailing business. The company is marked by attractive availability and prices. This ideal combination made Amazon the busiest online store in USA so far.

Geographic scope – Amazon has branches in Canada, UK, Germany, Japan, France and China. Much less than eBay, but still considered a very global firm; most of the items can be ordered internationally, from the closest branch. For example an individual in Poland will order from Germany without any problems. 45 percent of sales occur outside North America.

Other objectives – Amazon likes developing partnerships like the one mentioned earlier which earns them revenues from fees and sales commission. They also have e-commerce partnerships with Target and Macy’s.

Amazon’s success so far

Amazon recently introduced “Giants Kindle Online Bookstore” and released free application use for iPhone and iPod touch users to read electronic book purchase. Amazon’s $359 Kindle 2 reading devise was released last month, including book marking, noting, highlighting and adjusting font size. According to Matea Gold, on Feb 10, 2009 “Amazon. Com Inc has unveiled its second-generation electronic reader, a slimmer and faster version of the Kindle devise it introduced 14 months ago with promises to revolutionize the way people read book”. Another article says, publishers and authors now have the power to silence the Kindle 2 e-book reader. Amazon.com Inc reversed course Friday on the device’s controversial text-to-speech features, which reads digital books aloud in a robotic voice” Alana Samuels, Feb 28th 2009. This illustrates Amazon’s development and success.



Amazon retail ranking is third overall. It has separate website for Canada, England, Germany, France, China, and Japan. Amazon’s web service development is worth noting as well. Its distinguishing capabilities include those of load balancing and to implement and configure technology in the Amazon web services. Load balancing an application helps taxes advantage of Amazon EC2’s elastic scaling, how to deploy a load-balancing solution inside the Amazon EC2 environment using round robin DNS or HA Proxy.

Positive and negative aspects:

Globally and historically Amazon has played a crucial role in providing digital access to learning through generations. An article from Amazon by Peggy M. Tomme “Affective teaching: psych-social aspects of physical education” is one of the examples of Amazon’s contribution to the moral development of young people. Research has demonstrated the value of cooperative sporting activities in encouraging honesty and respect of other people.”

About author

I, Zehra perusing a degree in Business Administration with majors in Finance from NM Highland University. This piece of work is part of my E-marketing coursework that I am carrying out under the guidance of Heath Anderson. The project involves creating a blog about internet marketing. I am not a big fan of internet shopping myself and have hardly ever bought anything online apart from my text books, but after carrying out this project the facts and figures that came to my knowledge, have got me attracted significantly to this modern version of shopping. Now I find myself really looking forward to carry out a considerable part of my shopping online through e bay and Amazon to help myself save both time and money. All in all this project has been a wonderful and enjoyable learning experience.