Unlike other large corporations, Amazon.com names only one founder: Jeff Bezos. From an early age, Bezos has always been an entrepreneur and an innovator. One summer in his high school years, he started his own small business. Along with his friend Ursula Werner, he ran a summer camp designed to teach kids about science and technology that he dubbed “The Dream Institute.” When Bezos recalls this venture, he mentions that he considers Werner his first business partner. As an adult he worked for many other corporations, such as McDonald’s, Bankers Trust Company, and D.E. Shaw & Co. He preferred working for young startup companies, such as Fitel, rather than established corporations such as Intel and Bell Labs (Scally 20-22, 29-30).
While he was working for D.E. Shaw, Bezos discovered that Internet usage was supposedly growing by 2,300 percent each year. He knew that this was too good of an opportunity to pass up, and that he had to create a business model taking full advantage of the rapid expansion of the Internet. Bezos decided to sell books because there was no store in existence that could offer a consumer any book they could possibly want. The diversity of books
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available through the Internet would give his bookstore the advantage over any physical bookstore (Wittekind 28-30). When trying to decide on a name for his business, Bezos was originally fixed on Cadabra, inspired by the magic word abracadabra. However, he realized during a phone call with his lawyer that “Cadabra” sounds a lot like “Cadaver” (Scally 40-41). Bezos enlisted the help of his friend Jeff Holden to help think of a new name for his website. He was partial at first to MakeItSo.com, a nod to Star Trek. Some other ideas were Awake.com, Browse.com, Bookmall.com, and Aard.com, all of which were registered by Bezos and his wife but eventually abandoned. Bezos was particularly fond of the domain Relentless.com, which he registered in September of 1994 and has kept to this day. When typed into a web browser, Relentless.com still redirects to Amazon.com. However, because most web listings at this time were organized alphabetically, he decided to stick with a name beginning with A (Stone 28, 31). Bezos says the final name was chosen because it was easy to spell, started with an A, and showed consumers how vast the site really is. “‘...Earth’s biggest river, Earth’s biggest bookstore’” (Scally 41). Bezos always refers to his website as “Amazon.com,” never just “Amazon” (Stone 55). Like many others who have become successful in the field of technology, Bezos started to build his empire in his own garage.
His original staff consisted only of himself, his wife MacKenzie, and two programmers. Bezos received a $300,000 loan from his parents and other smaller investments totalling $1 million to help start his business (Wittekind 33-34). Instead of promising to be profitable in two or three years, Bezos told investors that he didn’t plan on turning a profit for four or five years. However, enough investors took the plunge. Amazon.com officially opened for business in July 1995, and even though there was no advertising for the website, it was immediately very popular (Scally 42, 44-45). The first book ever sold by Amazon.com was Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies (Wittekind
38). Amazon.com’s posted revenue at its founding was $511,000, but by 1999 sales had reached $1.64 billion annually (Milliot). The first stock for Amazon.com sold on the NASDAQ stock exchange in 1997, just two years after its founding (Scally 43). These shares originally sold for $18 each, but by the next year they were valued at $105 each. Amazon.com went international in 1998, purchasing online bookstores located in Great Britain and Germany. In 1999, Amazon.com acquired many other companies, including Alexa Internet, which was used to track the browsing habits of consumers (Wittekind 55, 64, 67). Even though it seemed to be successful, Amazon.com did not turn a profit in the five years promised to investors. It first started making money in 2001, nearly seven years after its founding. Although its profits were $5 million, its debt had reached $2.8 billion (Van Ullen). The day after Bezos announced Amazon.com had finally turned a profit, however, the value of its stock increased by over 40 percent (Wittekind 81). As Amazon.com grew, Jeff Bezos knew that it should begin to offer more than just books. In June of 1998, Amazon.com officially launched its music store. At its opening, the store had around 125,000 CDs available. While it was met with criticism, the store was a huge success. It sold over $14 million worth of merchandise in its first four months (Wittekind 61). In the same year, Amazon.com began to offer DVDs and videos, and in 1999, electronics, toys, home improvement items, software, and video games were added to its inventory (Milliot).
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.
Starting out as solely an online bookstore, Amazon has become the largest online retailer in the world.
There were many strong points in Bezos’s business plan. He carefully planned every detail of this business. One of the key strengths that Bezos relied upon was his unique understanding of both computer science and marketplace economics. His degree in computer science combined with his years working on Wall Street gave him a broad perspective on the e-commerce market. He understood what the technology would look like in order to make his ideas reality. He also had a firm grasp on the economics of the market. He knew that branding would be the essential differentiating factor between him and his competitors. He also knew that the best way to establish a strong brand was by putting your customers needs and wants first and letting the investors take care of themselves. He did not care for the idea that good customer service was just a way to drive profits. Instead he took the approach that good customer service is a way to drive growth, which in turn would drive better customer service.
For our business profile project, we focused on Amazon. Amazon.com Inc. was founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994. Amazon was first started in Bezos ' garage and has turned into a billion dollar operation over the course of 22 years (Smith). Amazon is currently headquartered in Seattle, Washington and has branch locations all over the world. Amazon is most 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.
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 $5 million in the first year of operations” (2004). This huge success so quickly would have confirmed for Jeff that his idea was viable and drove him to continue to strive for more. Jeff Bezo’s charismatic-visionary leadership is the key to his and Amazon’s success.
Launched by Jeff Bezos, the Amazon.com website started in 1995 and is today considered as one of the most prominent retail website on the internet with a record turnover of US$ 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).
Books are great thing don’t you think? Barnes & Nobles is the number one bookstore in the entire country. It started in 1886. Barnes & Nobles is all over the world. It has supported many events. They have become the number one bookstore in the United States. They sell a variety of books and other products. They have grown a lot over the past 132 years. They have a long history of excellence by serving millions of customers with its wide selection of books.
.... Amazon uses the internet to allow customers to make content searches, for instance inside books. In addition it has used e-commerce to enable customers to buy online access to certain books through its upgrade program (Webanalyticsbook.com, 2007).
From just an idea to the actual start up, Amazon’s creation didn’t just happen overnight. The creator, Jeff Bezos, was inspired by the internet and was the right guy in the right place. Starting with researching and examining recent online retailers top sellers, Bezos started to create a list. The list he
Amazon is the world’s largest retailer online. Founded in 1994 it has started as an online bookstore but soon expends its catalog with software, video games, electronics, furniture, food, toys etc.
Jeffrey Bezos, the founder and current CEO of Amazon.com, initially started the company as an online bookstore in 1994. Within several months, Amazon spread its operation to all 50 states and abroad. Presently, customers from over 45 countries buy at Amazon. Over a short period of time, the company expanded sales to electronics, video games, software, CDs, DVDs, MP3 downloads, food, furniture, apparel, jewelry, and toys. Today, the company even produces its own products such as the Kindle series. Also, Amazon.com is one of the major providers of cloud computing services. Currently, the company is the largest global online retailer responsible for 20% of online retail market share.
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.
The company started as an online book seller, which then rapidly expanded into music and movies, and finally into electronics and households.
He and his wife, MacKenzie, drove to Seattle to be close to a book wholesaler called Ingram. MacKenzie drove the car while Jeff typed the business plan for the company. Jeff had already spent several months planning Amazon.com while he was at D.E. Shaw. He had traveled multiple times to California to meet with Shel Kaphan, a programmer who was the first employee at Amazon.com, and other programmers.
Both initiatives were so well put together by Amazon’s founder and CEO that today they represent a significant percentage of Amazon’s total revenue (Esten, 2007). Bezos entrepreneurial visions furthered that of Amazon when in 2004 he helped found Blue Origin, a human spaceflight tourism start-up company. Recently, the 43-year-old capitalist had been using a lot of his time and business knowledge to philanthropic work, heading his own foundation and addressing important issues to the whole world (Jeff Bezos, 2007). Jeff Bezos has proved to be a very successful businessman with an incomparable entrepreneurial vision for opportunities. He led a small garage start-up e-bookstore to become the biggest online retailer in the world.