Case Study
Unit VI Case Study: Amazon.com By Chanda Maneval
Amazon.com’s success online is attributed to many reasons: first they are a massive e-commerce pure-click business, meaning that they exclusively use the Web site to facilitate or conduct the sale of products (Kotler & Keller, 2012). Being a pure-click company allows products sold on Amazon.com to have a lower price than those found in the brick-and-mortar companies due to lower overhead prices (McArdle, 2012). They also have about 40 warehouses and can build one in less than a year; shortening the shipping time and bringing them closer to the customers (McArdle, 2012). Everything Amazon.com does is customer and third party merchant centric – they invest in technology to make the shopping experience easier and faster (Kotler & Keller, 2012). Amazon.com has built and maintains a huge customer base; they manage customer information to design recommendations for each customer and developed a “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” section. For example if you buy one product they will offer/suggest another similar to being offered fries with your burger (First, n.d.). Another reason Amazon.com is successful are the many things they continue to do such as building a set of online service platforms for developers/third-party merchants (Rosoff, 2007). These platforms make it easy for any merchant to create a virtual store with low risk and no additional cost (Kotler & Keller, 2012). An example is Amazon’s flexible payment services, which allow a merchant to accept money from customers without having to build the e-commerce system from scratch (Rosoff, 2007). The Kindle will revolutionize the book industry for several reasons some of which will be discussed below. Obvious reasons are that customers can take hundreds to thousands of books with them on a trip or simply a way to have a book collection at home without taking up massive space or the cumbersome weight of hard copy books. No more
Amazon.com’s success online is attributed to many reasons: first they are a massive e-commerce pure-click business, meaning that they exclusively use the Web site to facilitate or conduct the sale of products (Kotler & Keller, 2012). Being a pure-click company allows products sold on Amazon.com to have a lower price than those found in the brick-and-mortar companies due to lower overhead prices (McArdle, 2012). They also have about 40 warehouses and can build one in less than a year; shortening the shipping time and bringing them closer to the customers (McArdle, 2012). Everything Amazon.com does is customer and third party merchant centric – they invest in technology to make the shopping experience easier and faster (Kotler & Keller, 2012). Amazon.com has built and maintains a huge customer base; they manage customer information to design recommendations for each customer and developed a “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” section. For example if you buy one product they will offer/suggest another similar to being offered fries with your burger (First, n.d.). Another reason Amazon.com is successful are the many things they continue to do such as building a set of online service platforms for developers/third-party merchants (Rosoff, 2007). These platforms make it easy for any merchant to create a virtual store with low risk and no additional cost (Kotler & Keller, 2012). An example is Amazon’s flexible payment services, which allow a merchant to accept money from customers without having to build the e-commerce system from scratch (Rosoff, 2007). The Kindle will revolutionize the book industry for several reasons some of which will be discussed below. Obvious reasons are that customers can take hundreds to thousands of books with them on a trip or simply a way to have a book collection at home without taking up massive space or the cumbersome weight of hard copy books. No more
References: Aljabre, A. (2012). Cloud Computing for Increased Business Value. [Article]. International Journal of Business & Social Science, 3(1), 234-239. First, M. (n.d.). Why Amazon.com is so successful Retrieved December 22, 2012, from http://marketfirst.com. Fowlkes, M. (2012). Another great quarter for Amazon (AMZN), What 's Next? Retrieved December 22, 2012, from http://www.marketintelligencecenter.com Horn, L. (2012). Amazon 's Kindle Owners Lending Library Tops 100,000 Titles. [Article]. PC Magazine, 1-1. Kotler, P., & Keller, K. L. (2012). Marketing management (14th [ed.] ed.). Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall. Manjoo, F. (2012). Amazon makes everything better. Retrieved from www.slate.com McArdle, M. (2012). SHOPPING BECOMES A MINI-VACATION. [Article]. Newsweek, 160(24), 34-39. Rosoff, M. (2007). Why Amazon could succedd where others have failed. Retrieved from http://news.cnet.com Thoughts, T. (2012). Cloud computing pushed in the right direction Retrieved December 22, 2012, from www.techthoughts.biz