Amazon Business Advantage

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The most obvious technological advance that helped Amazon, and the one that launched the company, was the internet (Parnell, 2014). Jeff Bezos knew that he wanted to open an online business and decided to start with a bookstore due to low pricing and an existing worldwide demand (”Amazon.com, Inc. History”, n.d.). After deciding on a model, he chose Seattle as a home for his business due to its proximity to high tech workers and a large book distributor. The website opened with a database of more than one million titles, whereas many competitors only stocked 2,000, and the orders went directly to wholesalers. Amazon quickly expanded their database to 1.5 million books and started offering deep discounts which attracted many new customers. …show more content…

Associates would link customers to Amazon for order fulfillment and the originating web site would earn a commission from the sale (”Amazon.com, Inc. History”, n.d.). Within two years, Amazon had 60,000 websites signed up as Associates. By 1998 Amazon had become one of the largest booksellers in the US with 2.5 million titles and a customer list of over 2.26 million people. This same year they decided to launch their music store with 125,000 music titles and added toys and electronics in 1999. Even with all this growth, Amazon was still operating in losses into 2001 when sales hit 3.12 billion. When profits finally started to arrive in the fourth quarter of 2001, Bezos had finally proven that his market share driven approach could lead towards …show more content…

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

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