If Amazon had never created headquarters in Seattle, the city would have never become the power it is today. Amazon started as an online company selling books out of a garage in 1994 (Rosenberg and González). However, under the leadership of CEO Jeff Bezos, Amazon began to grow. By 2001, Amazon took over a total of 630,000 square feet across Seattle (Rosenberg and González). This city was chosen to hold Amazon’s headquarters because it was where Bezos lived as a child, and where he started the company (Rosenberg and González). So, the company chose to inhabit South Lake Union, a county in Seattle, merely because at the time, it was referred to generally as a ‘sea of parking lots’ with much room for growth (Rosenberg and González). Now, Amazon …show more content…
The headquarters is 8.1 million square feet and spans over thirty-three buildings (Selyukh). It features a park built under a dome, thirty-four restaurants, and lots of new technology Amazon engineers test to further the company (Selyukh). Amazon’s headquarters has impacted Seattle twice as much as any other company has impacted any other big city. The company has fueled Seattle’s growing economy, but also caused many issues (Rosenberg and González). Amazon has become so huge that only having one headquarters is beginning to limit the growth of the company. So, Amazon has decided to create another headquarters that is independent and equal to Seattle, nicknamed HQ2 (Reisinger). This will be Amazon’s second headquarters in North America (“Amazon HQ2”). Since there is not enough space in Seattle and real estate prices are continuing to increase, moving to a new city will be a good move to save money (Reisinger). Some of the 20 finalists are Chicago, Nashville, New York, Atlanta, Miami, and even Raleigh (“Amazon HQ2”). Some of the requirements for HQ2 are that the city must be near an international airport and a large interstate (Selyukh). Plus, the city must have lots of public transportation and a population of at least one million people (Selyukh). Amazon is expected to make a decision some time in 2018 (“Amazon
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.
It is divided into several independent organizations like Amazon Europe, Amazon US and Amazon Japan.
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.
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.
Scenario: Customers rave about the vast selection, fast shipping, and customer review option for each and every product on the Amazon.com website. The Fortune 500 e-commerce website, headquartered in Seattle, Washington, is the largest internet-based retailer in the United States. Customers are well informed about their purchase with customer reviews and Amazon has competitive prices. Amazon is one of the most successful businesses of our era and most valuable retailer of the country (Kantor & Streitfield, 2015). Amazon Prime members, a program with a yearly membership charge, receive special perks such as free shipping, unlimited streaming of television shows and movies, music streaming, downloads of free books, and many other deals and discounts
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).
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
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).
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 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.
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.
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.
Statistically, working at an Amazon fulfillment center is less dangerous than working at a department store (Bernton and Kelleher, “Amazon Warehouse”), but that might not be entirely true. The Seattle Times interviewed Amazon workers at an Amazon warehouse in Campbellsville, they said, “Three former workers at Amazon’s warehouse in Campbellsville told The Seattle Times there was pressure to manage injuries so they would not have to be reported to OSHA, such as attributing workplace injuries to pre-existing conditions or treating wounds in a way that did not trigger federal reports.” (Bernton and Kelleher, “Amazon Warehouse”). Amazon was using their power to compromise the safety of their own workers so they wouldn’t jeopardize their safety record. The article in The Seattle Times goes on to say that there were reports of warehouse officials trying to persuade doctors into treating the injuries so that it wouldn’t trigger a report of any kind.