Value chain analysis is a method to review all the activities in an organization that contribute to maximizing competitive advantage and customer delight while identifying non value added waste and costs in the value chain process (Walter & Rainbrid, 2007). The purpose of this paper is to analyze Amazon’s value chain. Amazon’s mission statement reads as “our vision is to be earth’s most customer centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.” This paper will provide facts to analysis if this mission has been accomplished (“About amazon,”). The company was founded in 1994 by Jeffery P. Bezos. In the early years of Amazon they were mostly known for selling books. The idea behind it was that traditional brick-and-mortar stores could not hold more than a few hundred thousand books, whereas Amazon being an online store could hold an infinite amount of books (“History of amazon.com,”). Since its early days of being an online book store Amazon as grown to become a fortune 500 company with a global reach. Amazon operates in over 10 countries worldwide with over 88,000 employees (“Inside amazon,”). Amazon is one of the most visited sites in the world, with over 500,000,000 monthly visitors, and over 100 million active members (“Top 15 most popular websites”, 2014).
Amazon’s growth is deeply rooted in its value chain. Value chain represents the internal activates a firm engages in when transforming inputs into outputs. In this paper Amazon’s value chain processes will be reviewed. By understanding which activities Amazon engages an analysis can provide the reasons that Amazon has an effective competitive advantage and an increasing number of customer delight among its industry rivals. In 1985 Porter describes the value chain as the internal activities firms engage in to produce goods and services, these activities have been broken down into primary activities and support