Brief introduction: Amazon.com, often referred to as simply Amazon, is an American electronic commerce and cloud computing company with headquarters in Seattle, Washington. It is the largest Internet-based retailer in the world by total sales and market capitalization. Amazon has separate retail websites for the United States, the United Kingdom and Ireland, France, Canada, Germany, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Australia, Brazil, Japan, China, India and Mexico. Amazon also offers international shipping to certain other countries for some of its products. Amazon launched its India marketplace, ‘Amazon.in’, in June 2013, offering books, movies and television shows for sale. Amazon developed a program to recruit an army of suppliers and convince them it was a trustworthy partner that could help them increase the market for their products. Amazon wheeled out a program called Amazon Chai Cart: mobile tea carts that navigated city streets, serving refreshments to small-business owners while teaching them the virtues …show more content…
In the U.S., Amazon uses a centralized shipping platform, which it calls Fulfilment by Amazon (FBA), to store and distribute the products it sells. Sellers send their goods to Amazon’s fulfilment centres and pay a fee for the corporation to store, pick, pack, and ship their wares. Amazon implemented FBA in India as well, and to date has built nearly two dozen warehouses there, the largest one in Kothari in Telangana. The company also localized its fulfilment platform in India by introducing Easy Ship and Seller Flex. With the former, Amazon couriers pick up packaged goods from a seller’s place of business and deliver them to consumers. With the latter, vendors designate a section of their own warehouses for products to be sold on Amazon.in, and Amazon coordinates the delivery logistics. This “neighbourhood” approach is convenient for sellers and has benefited Amazon by speeding up delivery of some
It is divided into several independent organizations like Amazon Europe, Amazon US and Amazon Japan.
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
Although Amazon has been active trying to find the perfect strategy to make profits, the numbers in its financial statements had not shown the most optimal results. We have discuss that even though its strategies have been right according to supply chain and logistics methodologies and theory, something had been missing to represent this successful strategies into financial results. It is seen that Amazon had spent too long time finding the right strategy which the last might be the one because in the financial statements profits started to come up. Amazon still have a long way to go to mature its strategy and represents it into profits for its shareholders.
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.
In this model of supply chain, Amazon acts as an agent where it doesn’t own the product or even store the product in the warehouse. The suppliers can sell their products online through Amazon. In this model, the suppliers list their products online through Amazon and when a customer buys it, the product is directly shipped from the supplier to the customer. Amazon acts an agent and takes agents fee from the supplier.
Controlling inventory is known to be one of the toughest problems for companies. With 39 million active customer accounts and a vision such as being "Earth’s biggest selection of product", Amazon has been putting a lot of effort to be as efficient as possible in their inventory management.
Also, Amazon sells many products from many different brands and companies. The customers are most important to Amazon and Amazon knows that the delivery service is one thing that customers want the most. The way that Amazon fulfills the customer’s satisfaction of its delivery service is by having 55 fulfillment centers located in North America. Because fulfillment centers are not retail stores, Amazon products aren’t required to charge sale taxes. Along with the 53 fulfillment centers that Amazon has in North America, Amazon also has 53 distribution centers in Europe, Japan, Asia and India. Since Amazon has a lot of warehouses in many different locations, it can reach to its customers more conveniently. Amazon has been growing throughout the years has allowed its company to be able to reduce its costs. Besides being one of the top online shopping sites, Amazon has also developed the Kindle, which is now one of the most popular e-reader tablets out
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
In 1999 Bezos invested huge amounts of money to help Amazon become a more efficient company. He built warehouses in the United States to store inventory, in order to prevent under stocking during the holidays and also offer a greater selection of products that the companies distributors could not. Along with inventory, the company invested in logistics, such as controlling the supply chain through the same technology they used to create their unique website. Also they began to customize their website to individual customers. They stored information about the customers, which in turn made it easier for them to purchase goods on their website, which then reduced threat of the customer going to Amazon's competitors instead. Amazon wants the easiest and most enjoyable experience for customers when they visit the site. Bezos realized, that consumers need to have a good sense of security when purchasing products online, so the company invested in infrastructure and created an integrated system of customer service operations and payment processes.
Amazon.com was a venture into an emerging market of internet and had to face hidden and unexpected hurdles in order to survive and excel in the market. Therefore, Amazon.com kept modifying its strategies with their focus on enhancing customer experience of online shopping and to delivery exceptional services with complete convenience to their customers. One of the major strategic decisions was to compromise on cost saving stragegy when Amazon.com started to maintain its own warehouses in different countries in order to ensure timely and accurate delivery to their customers
Amazon model initially offered customers access to massive selection without the needs to incur cost, time and stress of opening warehouses and stores and the needs for inventory handling. Amazon realized to ensure customers get a pleasant experience and Amazon acquire its inventory at reasonable prices, they need to be in control of the transaction process from beginning to the end through operating the business from their own warehouses.
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”).
Amazon.com, Inc Company started in 1994 and featured online in 1995. The company has done extremely well in the market achieving remarkable success. Initially, Amazon was known as Cadabra. Inc. however, the name of the company changes when the owners of the company knew that people confused the name for cadaver. Jeff Bezos is credited for founding the company. The company has its base in the United States of America as a multinational e-commerce company. Its headquarters are in Seattle, Washington. It has been rated as the largest online retailing company, in the entire world. It has close to three times the sales revenue that staples, Inc made as a runner up, in January 2010 (Shire, 2008).
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.
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.