Ian Angstadt
MIS- Monday Wednesday 8:30
Case Presentation

Amazon.com - Not Your Average Bookstore

Jeffrey Bezos, Founder and CEO of Amazon.com is running one of the worlds biggest operations on planet earth. Amazon was first opened as an online bookstore, where people could go and shop for just about every book ever published. Bezos grew this company into much more however making it one of the largest and most profitable businesses in the world today.

Bezos Graduated from Princeton University and was the youngest vice president at Bankers Trust in New York. He had a choice to make however in the 1990’s. He had to decide if he wanted risk everything to live his dream of starting an online retail store in hopes that the internet boom would cause his company to skyrocket from profits, or did he want to be safe and stay on wall street and make guaranteed millions of dollars from the 1994 wall street bonus. Bezos decided to take the risk and start his company from scratch as an online bookstore. He made this decision by asking himself to look forward on his life when he is 80 years old and asking himself what he should have done with his life. Bezos started off selling books and 20 products he believed that would sell well on the internet. Bezos made this model on items that he believed would be easy to ship, in his mind books were the biggest seller for him. In 1994, Bezos sold his first book order that he and his wife personally packaged and mailed.

Amazon has a strictly E-Business strategy. This means that they have no physical stores and do strictly all their shipping through their online website. What started as a human edited list of product suggestions led to Amazon being a sophisticated computer-generated recommendation engine. The company can actually track every single click a website viewer takes. The can tell how long they spent on a page and what products they are in the market for. With this technology they can inspire their customers to finally purchase the deal by offering them deals and suggestions on products they should buy. They also track the success of promotions in order to gather buying and selling patterns. Amazon has also introduced Online customer reviews in order to provide their customers with necessary feedback on their products so they can feel safe when purchasing their products from the worlds largest online retailer. Amazon has done nothing but grow since they first started and recently have introduced more sales types. These new sales types include Auctions, Z-Shops, and most recent Amazon Marketplace which allows customers to sell their used items. Doing these things allows Amazon to offer just about every product one can think of.

Amazon has already begun to shape its future even more. They recently released a web service that allows its business partners to interact with its website. This service means that Amazon’s partners can access catalog data, create and populate amazon.com, and even to initiate a check-out process. In the last 16 months, the company has inspired 30,000 associates to invent new ways to extend Amazon’s popularity and viewpoints on the internet. Amazon has become a brand that everyone knows about and uses from day to day in conversations. Amazon is always looking for new ways to take advantage of ebusiness. Their creations include, Amazon S3, Amazon MP3, Vine, and Kindle. Amazon S3 is an online storage service called Amazon Simple Storage Service. Any type of data from 1 byte to 5 gigabytes in size, can be stored on the service and the customer is charged monthly fees for storage. Amazon MP3 is an online music store that sells downloadable MP3’s and are selling music from the world top 4 record labels as well as multiple independents. Vine is a process that rewards top product reviewers by providing them with free access to products from vendors