With a mission “to be Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices,” Amazon. com and other sellers offer millions of unique new, refurbished, and used items in categories such as books; movies; music & games; digital downloads; electronics & computers; home & garden; toys; kids & baby; grocery; apparel; shoes & jewelry; health & beauty; sports & outdoor; and tools, auto & industrial. The company entered the e-book hardware industry in 2007 with the release of the original Kindle reader.The Kindle family has now grown to include Kindle Fire HD 4G LTE Wireless, with HD display, Dolby Digital Plus, and 4G connectivity; and Kindle Paperwhite, the world’s most advanced e-reader. Consumers Technological innovation drives the growth of Amazon. com to offer customers more types of products, more conveniently and at lower prices.
Since 1995, Amazon has significantly expanded its product selection, international retail websites, and worldwide network of fulfillment and customer service centers. Today, Amazon retail websites offer everything from toys and video games to MP3 downloads and collectible items.Amazon has teams across the world working on behalf of its customers at Fulfillment Centers, which provide fast, reliable shipping directly from Amazon’s retail websites, and Customer Service Centers, which provide 24/7 support. In addition, Amazon’s technology teams are located in Seattle and in International Development Centers designed to tap the world’s best technical talent. Sellers In 2000, Amazon.
com began to offer its best-of-breed e-commerce platform to other retailers and to individual sellers. Today, hundreds of thousands of orld-class retail brands and individual sellers increase their sales and reach new customers by leveraging the power of the Amazon. com e-commerce platform. Partners work with Amazon Services to power their e-commerce offerings from end-to-end, including technology services, merchandising, customer service, and order fulfillment.
Other branded merchants leverage Amazon. com as an incremental sales channel for their new merchandise. Over 2 million third-party sellers participate in Amazon where they offer new, used, and collectible selections at fixed prices to Amazon customers around the world.Content Creators Amazon continues to drive innovation by empowering content creators as well as consumers and sellers.
Kindle Direct Publishing and Amazon Publishing give authors innovative means to bring books to readers. Amazon Studios is developing feature films and episodic series in a new way, one that's open to great ideas from creators and audiences around the world. CreateSpace makes it simple to print and distribute books, music, and video through Internet retail outlets, personal websites, bookstores, retailers, libraries, and academic institutions--on-demand.Developers and Enterprises Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides Amazon’s developer customers with access to in-the-cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon’s own back-end technology platform, which developers can use to enable virtually any type of business. Some examples of the services offered by Amazon Web Services: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) • Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) • Amazon SimpleDB • Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) • Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS) • Amazon Mechanical Turk • Amazon CloudFront.
Seller Services make it “trivially easy” for individual sellers and merchants to do business on the Amazon platform. Through programs such as Marketplace and Advantage, or working with Amazon subsidiary Amazon Services, sellers of all shapes and sizes offer their selection to Amazon customers using various components of the e-commerce platform. E-Commerce Platform drives innovations in technology to power Amazon’s web sites and applications. Worldwide Operations and Customer Service ombine the rigors of Lean process design, Six Sigma quality, and a passion for technical innovation to oversee all aspects of supply chain management, transportation, logistics, distribution, inventory management, and customer service. Finance and Administration oversee Amazon’s financial health, including financial processes and controls, financial reporting and accounting practices, and facilities management and other administrative functions.
Human Resources comprises HR Business Partners, Recruiters, and Specialists in areas like Learning & Development, HRIS, and Compensation & Benefits.These teams engage with our business leaders to deliver our goal of finding, developing, and retaining the best and brightest people in the market, and work to support long-term career paths inline with Amazon's unique culture. Legal oversees Amazon’s intellectual property and patent efforts, public policy initiatives, business ethics and compliance, risk management, and litigation. Critical success factors for Amazon. com Low cost provider One of the biggest advantage amazon. com has is its ability to sell books and other products at extremely low price with compromising the quality of its product or service.
This advantage of Amazon. com quickly became one of its most important success factor Broad selection Leveraging on the power of the internet, Amazon. com are able to provide its customers a wide selection of books and product. Unlike the traditional retailers that needs to stock up inventory in order to display out to the public, Amazon. com displays its goods through an electronic catalog without having to stock all that is displayed ) Ease of Navigation Trying to revolutionize the shopping experience, Amazon. om was design with the intention of making the shopping experience as smooth as possible.
Sub menus and links are placed neatly on the page. Promotional items were displayed at “catchy” or strategic places. All this allows the customer to navigate freely and easily in the website and also helps with the searching process leading to a better shopping experience Convenience Another critical success factor of Amazon. com is the convenience it provides. Leveraging on the power of the internet. An e-tailer like Amazon.
om offers customers the convenience of shopping from home. All the customer needs to do is to login into the internet and webpage and then just navigate or browse through the web page until they find something they like or want Sufficient Information Advantages over other e-tailers First Mover Advantage Being one of the first few companies that ventured into the e-commerce business, Amazon. com has the first mover advantage compared to Wal-Mart online or Barnesandnoble.Being one of the first few, Amazon.
om enjoyed benefits like having a strong customer base, a strong brand and first hand experience of handling or running business with such nature Strategic Alliance One obvious advantage Amazon. com has over its competitor is the strategic alliance and affiliate partners Amazon. com has. The strategic alliances Amazon. com has allows Amazon to diversify from its original business model to accommodate a diverse range of product. For example in June 2002, the strategic alliances Amazon.
com forge with Sony enables Amazon. com to sell Sony product online.Through the help of its affiliate partners, customers are referred to Amazon. com allowing Amazon.
com to reach out to a larger market. As of to date Amazon. com has over 500,000 affiliate partners. All this has lead to an increase in business opportunities as it allows Amazon to offer more and at the same reach out to a larger market. Superior Customer Service Realizing that their business model is quickly being copied by its competitor, Amazon. com differentiates itself from the others by providing superior customer service.
Better customer service in Amazon. om comes in the form of additional features in their website to enhance the customer experience. One example of such feature is the ability to personalized their own account to suite different taste and manage orders online with their patented One-Click order feature.The One-Click feature comes with an e-wallet that enables the shoppers to place an order without having to enter their personal info like address and credit card info each time they place an order. This feature also allows the shoppers to view their order status and make any last minute amendments to any orders that have yet to be shipped.
