Business description: Amazon is an American e-commerce company. Company is the largest online retailer in the United States. Initially, it started as an online bookstore but later diversified into all kind of online services and later expanded into making its own products like tablets, kindle etc. Even, famous movie rating site IMDB is the further extension of their portfolio. In India, it launched jungle.com as a shopping comparison website before entering as Amazon.in in 2013.
Its value proposition was mainly the ease of selection and convenience to the book lovers and they translated the same value in the other segments after diversifying.
Its revenue model is Sales revenue model as it derives its revenue from selling of goods, information and services. It also derives a majority of its sales from third party sellers who sell product on Amazon.
Process followed and issues faced while selecting the company: Before starting with which company to pick for, I tried to understand about the history of the e-commerce as discussed in detail in class. Then, I searched to find some of the best known e-commerce companies. There were issues like there is too much information on the internet and there is not one particular company which one can find complete to understand at this junction of the course.
I have taken this particular company because of its repeated reference in all the books and lectures. Also, another reason for picking up this company is that Amazon does not only act in the B2C domain but also B2B. Along with that it was a first mover in its market place so it will be interesting to know how they managed it.
My objective will be to understand its current value proposition and revenue model. Talking about revenue model, I noticed one thing that although it is primarily sales revenue model but it also allows companies to advertise their products by paying to be listed as featured products. So, is it purely a sales model