Amazon.com Inc. is the leader in the online retail business that deals with electronic products and cloud hosting services. The company was founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994 but the website, which is the core marketing and selling platform for the company, was launched in 1995. Currently, the company’s headquarters are in Seattle, Washington, US.
The company operates several websites that target different markets i.e. in UK, France, Japan, China, Italy and Germany. The company is also planning to launch other websites that will target Netherlands, Poland and Sweden. Apart from selling electronic products, Amazon.
com also offers cloud hosting services to companies all over the world.Amazon is unlike any other retail site, differs from its competitors in that customers have numerous options when shopping on the Amazon website. When compared to other book sellers for example, Amazon offers features that other book sellers do not.One of the Amazon’s project – the Amazon Prime program offers different perks, such as allowing members to “rent” e-books for a short period. Amazon customers may also shop from a huge variety of items, and even download and watch television programs or movies. In terms of the Amazon’s Kindle/Kindle Fire and Apple’s iPad, the difference is in the way that the company makes money. Amazon strives to make money more from sales after the sale of the Kindle device than the actual selling of the reader itself. For example, people who purchase the Kindle will continue to purchase e-books through Amazon.
There is also a Kindle software which enables to use this product on the other platforms, such as PC’s tablet’s laptop’s and etc.Throughout the first four years of business, the company did not make any profit and many shareholders were overwhelmed by the nature of business the company was engaged in. Soon critics were proved wrong because during the fourth fiscal year the company made profit.
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Profit was not the only book marker but the fact that there seemed to be a major drift in selling of books from bookshops to eBooks the company was on track to made even more exploits as the online market continued to increase. As result of the tremendous growth, Jeff Bezos was announced «Person of the Year» by the Times Magazine.Originally Jeff Bezos wanted to give the company the magical sounding name “Cadabra.
But “Amazon’s first lawyer, Todd Tarbert, convinced him that the name sounded too similar to the company named “Cadaver,” especially over the phone. He finally chose “Amazon” because he liked that the company would be named after the largest river in the world, which was described on one of the company’s earliest logos. Amazon’s first headquarters was the Jeff’s garage and the servers that the company used required so much power that there was not a day without which Jeff blew a fuse after turning on a hair dryer or another electronic device.
The beginning of the success story of the Amazon.com started in 1994 when Jeff Bezos left his position as vice-president of D.E. Shaw one of the famous Wall Street firms, moved to Seattle, and began to work out a business plan.
He started to make up a list of 20 products which are more likely to be popular to be sold on the Using the elimination method he shrank the list to five most plausible to give profit: CD’s, books, videos, and computer software and hardware. But final decision was that this venture would sell books over the Web, due to the large worldwide market for literature. The most suitable place as the headquarters was Seattle, because of its large technological labor force and its optimal location for distribution in Oregon region.
Then he worked to raise funds for the company while also working with software developers to build the company’s vital marketing platform – the web site. It was launched in 1995 and became most popular web site after only four months of operations, making high marks on several Internet rankings. It climbed up to the sixth place of the ranking of the best sites on Point Communications’ “top ten” list. Customers could enter search information, prompting the system to surf the company’s database and find the desired titles.
The program then displayed information about the selection on a customer’s computer screen, and gave the customer the option to order the books with a credit card and have the books shipped in a just a few days.It was not even the end of first month of the launch when the site was already processing orders from 45 countries worldwide and 50 states across the USA. Majority of the orders through Amazon.com were directly through wholesalers and publishers, so no warehouse was needed, so a warehouse in Seattle with only 2,000 titles in stock was enough. Amazon.com would simply receive the books from the different sources, then ship them to the customer.
At first, the company operated out of Bezos’ garage, until it was clear that it was going to be a success, necessitating a move to a Seattle office, which served as the customer support, shipping, and receiving area.At the beginning Amazon faced a lot problems to set any norms as a relatively young venture in the Internet trading. With that point on the Jeff’s target he started to seek for new ways on making Amazon.com as convenient as possible to the maximum types of customers. For those people who knew what book they were looking for and just wanted quick performance and low cost, Amazon.
com offered powerful search qualities. For the start, it was nearly over 1 million-title database.. For other customers who were just looking for something to read in a general area of interest, Amazon.com offered topic areas to browse, as well as lists of bestsellers, and titles that were recently featured in the media.
For the people who did not know what to choose, Amazon offered a recommendation center where customer could find books based on mood, reading habits, or preferences. The recommendation center also offered titles based on records of books the customer had purchased in the past, if they were return customers to the site. As not enough the site also began offering 10 to 30 percent discounts on majority of titles, making the prices extremely affordable.The company started the expansion of its influence range by acquisition of three companies, two of which were acquired for the further expansion of Amazon.com in Europe.
Both companies gave Amazon not only the access to the new profit sources in two of most Europe’s most important countries, but it also gave existing Amazon more resources from all around the world. One of the largest online booksellers in the United Kingdom – The Bookpages, gave Amazon.com access to the U.K. market, Telebook, the largest online bookseller in Germany, served as the entrance to its home market. The third important purchase – Internet Movie Database was vital for its further movement into online video sales. The tremendous resources and information of the IMD served as a valuable asset in the building of the future domination of the Amazon.com.
Another sensation happened in 1998 when company announced that it will also expand to the music industry. Several months before officially opening its music site, Amazon.com asked its bookstore customers and members of the music profession to help design the new web site. At the of the second quarter of 1998 with very confident number of customer accounts which left the point of three million far behind and with sales figures for Amazon.com continued to rise, and more products and titles were added, the future looked bright for this young venture in the Internet trading.
With music as a part of the company mix on one hand, and video sales on the other, Jeff seemed to have accomplished his goal of invasion of the online sales market. As Bezos told in his interview to the Fortunemagazine in December 1996: “By the beginning of 21st century, there could be two or three big online bookstores. We need to be one of them.”It took only 2 years for Jeff Bezos to realize his statement as by the beginning of the first quarter of 1998 number of Amazon’s customer accounts was a slightly above 2 million, it was an increase by the half in just three months, and mind-bending increase of 564 percent over the previous year, it took Amazon.
com 27 months to serve its first million customers and only 6 to serve the second million. This made Amazon.com the third largest bookseller in the United States.In 2016 Amazon founded a new subsidiary which is called Prime Air. Prime Air is a conceptual drone-based delivery system which is now in the stage of the developement by Amazon.This is what is called future of the delivery systems – The Prime Air, which was taken as a joke a couple of years ago, is now developing and growing with full seriousness. As technology continues to grow and play a larger role in consumers’ lives, industries have transformed and adapted as well.
Companies have moved away from brick and mortar to predominantly online services as a result of ubiquitous Internet access. Online companies reduce overhead costs, including rent and wages, associated with operating a physical store.While online retailers are more convenient, purchases of goods and services are subject to additional shipping and handling charges incurred by the consumer.
Even though technology has transformed a number of industries over the past 10 years, shipping and postage has remained relatively unchanged. Traditional postal service providers such as UPS, FedEx have remained the primary source of shipping and handling for major retailers.Recently, Amazon has challenged the status quo with Amazon Prime Air.
Amazon Prime Air is a drone delivery system which anticipates package deliveries in 30 minutes or less. While the financial and economic impacts of drones are robust, FAA regulations in conjunction with privacy and safety concerns have delayed the launch of commercial drone services.Traditionally, drones had been only used in military technical sophistication, and high capabilities in reconnaissance operation. However due to economies of scale, consumers can now purchase drones for just $60.With widespread access, consumer companies such as Amazon have explored the use of unmanned aerial vehicles for commercial purposes. Amazon Prime Air has promised 30 minute delivery service for packages up to 5lbs. Google, in altruistic contrast to Amazon, has developed aerial drones for environmental conservation and delivery of medicine to remote locations.
Powered by batteries, drones are more environmentally friendly than delivery trucks.According to all the achievements, organizational structure, and generally the behavior of the Amazon Inc as a company it is obvious that all the tasks, such as development of retail business, implementation of new ideas, and etc. Amazon Inc is surely the leader in the industry. From the beginning Amazon as a company has always been the game changer in the retail business and it is obvious that all of this couldn’t be without the leader, of the company Jeff Bezos, who has proven that in order to move the industry to the future you need to experiment and as his quote says at the beginning of this essay « It’s not an experiment if you know it’s going to work »
