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What are the chief elements of Amazon’s overall competitive strategy? How well do the pieces fit together? Is the strategy still evolving
What are the chief elements of Amazon’s overall competitive strategy? How well do the pieces fit together? Is the strategy evolving
Amazon competitive strategy analysis
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When you think of online shopping one of the first things you think of is Amazon. Amazon has one of the best supply chain systems in the world. Launched in 1995 as an online bookstore, it is now the largest online retailer in the U.S. With an online inventory of 170 million products, Amazon has an innovative supply chain management system that creates a highly competitive advantage. This “tour” of Amazon will go over some of the operations and what makes Amazon the company it is. One Step Ahead Amazon knows what you want before you buy it. One of Amazon’s tactics is the use of analytics. When viewing Amazon, similar items to the ones you are viewing or purchased in the past are displayed. Predicting what customers want increases sales, …show more content…
They have come out with products such as the Kindle, Amazon Fire Phone, and most recently the Amazon Dash Button. It’s a small Wi-Fi-enabled button that will instantly order an already determined product within seconds of pressing it. Amazon already has your credit card information on file, and knows what size and quantity you want, so two days later, that product shows up at your house. Amazon’s Dash Button will change the way customers buy their everyday products like toilet paper, paper towels, razors, and laundry detergent. Dash is only available to Amazon Prime members free of charge, and is starting out with 18 different partners. While it is not supplying the sensors, it is providing what it says is a very easy back end through Amazon Web Services that does the heavy lifting of taking the order, processing the payment, and fulfilling it. This new technology makes it easy for customers to become repeat buyers of everyday products that Amazon carries. Eye on the Prize Amazon keeps its eye on its own paper. The company is not distracted by competition, and they don’t need to be. Focusing on competitors creates dead ends for companies. Focusing on the company and customers instead is an endless source of energy because customers always want something new. Companies that focus on competitors end up putting out failed products just so
Amazon.com’s US operation business model is based on “sell all, carry few”. Amazon offers consumers a wide selection of products while keeping inventories at low levels. A major interest for Amazon in the US is optimization of netwo...
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.
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”).
Jeff Bezo’s began Amazon in his garage in July 1995 with three Sun workstations setting on wooden doors for tables and extension cords running from everywhere (Academy of Achievement, 2010). Right from the beginning he was a visionary leaving his well paying job as a senior vice president with D. E. Shaw to begin Amazon.com (Academy of Achievement, 2010). Being the visionary that he is he saw an opportunity prompted by the huge growth rate of internet use in a single year and ran with it never looking back. Jeff realized that the internet had “no real commerce to speak of” so he began researching possible businesses (Academy of Achievement, 2010). “After reviewing 20 mail order businesses and deciding which could be conducted more efficiently over the internet than by traditional means he decided on books” (Academy of Achievement, 2010). He thought books were perfect because attempting to send huge catalogs for all the available books would be expensive and cumbersome, but an online resource database that was easy to navigate would provide customers with easy access and a single point from which to shop. “In 30 days, with no press, Amazon had sold books in all 50 states and 45 foreign countries, obviously by the success of Amazon he was right (Academy of Achievement, 2010). In a case study written by Javad Kargar called “Amazon.com in 2003” he stated that “Amazon's online store was a big hit, with about $5 million in the first year of operations” (2004). This huge success so quickly would have confirmed for Jeff that his idea was viable and drove him to continue to strive for more. Jeff Bezo’s charismatic-visionary leadership is the key to his and Amazon’s success.
Amazon’s macro-environment is made up of six external factors: political, economic, environmental, technological, social, and legal conditions. These factors are important because they shape how the company operates and you must know each piece to be able to compete within the retail and eCommerce industry. An evolving political factor are the efforts the government has made toward punishing offenders of cyber-crime. This kind of thief wasn’t walking into your store, but hacking into your computer. This type of crime wasn’t possible before the internet. The government has started to take these crimes more serious as technology evolves. Technology is a factor that Amazon.com must invest heavily in. They are reliant on having top of the line technology to survive against cyber-crime and to stay relevant in the tech world. ECommerce is everywhere now and competition is very high. This brings in legal conditions; Amazon must know what laws exist in which countries because they are a
Launched by Jeff Bezos, the Amazon.com website started in 1995 and is today considered as one of the most prominent retail website on the internet with a record turnover of US$ 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).
Amazon has been able to maintain sustainable competitive advantage based on three operational strategies. These are low cost-leadership, customer differentiation and focus strategies. Low cost-leadership is pursued by Amazon by differentiating itself primarily on the basis of price. By offering low prices to customers Amazon ensures its future success. Partially modifying the costs of lowering prices over time through achieving higher sales volumes, negotiating better terms with suppliers, and achieving better operating efficiencies. Amazon makes sure that it offers the same quality products as other companies at a considerably cheaper price. Another strategy that Amazon has is its fast delivery service and there are many delivery services that one can choose from. With Amazon Prime, there are certain, but many products that have free two-day shipping. Also, with Amazon Prime, there are many offers specifically for people that have Amazon Prime. For example,
In conclusion, Amazon has embraced innovation. The company has not had worries with the use of innovation. They use innovations as measurements and end up with flourishing business ideas. They experiment, learn through outcomes and try new ways of doing things. They have put the customer as their first priority. Everything that the company does gears towards attracting customers through quality of services, availability of products, assurance of delivery and addressing customer feedbacks. These factors have helped the company become a multinational and a multimillion company where customers flock everyday.
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
Competition – The biggest competitor of Amazon is EBay and all the internet retailers and suppliers as Priceline.com; Buy.com; BN.com and many more.
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.
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.
Amazon is a growing and trending brand, giving consumers the unique shopping experience they have always wanted. The company that was started by 1999 man of the year, Jeff Bezos, has taken 44 percent market share in online sales and purchases. (http://bloomreach.com/2015/10/survey-amazon-is-burying-the-competiton-in-search/) That makes consumers more inclined to search for products through Amazon, before the well-known search engine powerhouse, Google. The Seattle, Washington based company was started in 1995. During the well-anticipated start-up, the company’s focus was on book sales online. Over time, Amazon has set many trends in Consumer Behavior, expanding products across every product pool imaginable. "Amazon.com puts the customer
In 2002 Annual Report, Amazon has made numerous attempts so that they will remain ahead among its competitors in the industry. Among those efforts includes store personalization that cater for each customer, show customer reviews on its offering products and wide selection to the customer by placing used products next to the new products.
One of the greatest opportunities for Amazon is an Online Payment System. The online system allows the company to reduce transaction fees and increase ease of use for their customers. Internet sales are increasing at a fast pace. This is a product of increased fuel prices, which make driving to a store less likely, and foreign purchases. This development allows foreign purchases to buy clothing as it becomes more popular abroad. Amazon’s biggest competitors can include retail stores that online stores such as Target, Best Buy, and Walmart among others, these can be considered the most dangerous for them since they have strong market share and can be a direct competitor since they attack the same market. Amazon wish to compete in prices, offering