Amazon

1 Amazon.com Amazon is perhaps the company that is most closely tied with the dot.com gold rush phenomenon. Since 1995 the Seattle based company has grown at a tremendous rate with revenues rising from about $150 million in 1997 to $3.1 billion in 2001. The company made its first quarterly profit of $5.8 million in the fourth quarter of 2001. However, this was dwarfed by massive cumulative operating losses. Amazon’s share price symbolizes the effects of the dot-com gold-rush: [pic] Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos, a computer science and electrical engineering graduate from Princeton University. Bezos had moved to Seattle after resigning as the senior vice-president at D.E.Shaw, a Wall Street investment bank. He did not know much about the Internet. But, he came across a statistic that the Internet was growing at 2300%, which convinced him that this was a large growth opportunity. Not knowing much more, he plunged into the world of E-Commerce with no prior retailing experience. Despite this, during the early days of the Net, Jeff Bezos was one of the few people to understand the special nature of Internet Retailing and E-Commerce. Our goal is to be Earth's most customer-centric company, why' The answer is three things:The first is that customer-centric means figuring out what your customer want by asking them, then figuring out how to give it to them, and then giving it to them. That's the traditional meaning of customer-centric, and we're focused on it. The second is innovating on behalf of customers, figuring out what they don't know they want and giving it to them. The third meaning, unique to the Internet, is the idea of personalization: Redecorating the store for each and every individual customer. If we have 10.7 million customers, as we did at the end of the last quarter, then we should have 10.7 million stores. “In the online world, businesses have the opportunity to develop very deep relationships with customers, both through accepting preferences of customers and then observing their purchase behavior over time, so that you can get that individualized knowledge of the customer and use that individualized knowledge of the customer to accelerate their discovery process. If we can do that, then the customers are going to feel a deep loyalty to us, because we know them so well”. "Bill Gates laid it out in a magazine interview. He said, "I buy all my books at Amazon.com because I'm busy and it's convenient. They have a big selection, and they've been reliable." Those are three of our four core value propositions:convenience, selection, service. The only one he left out is price: we are the broadest discounters in the world in any product category. But maybe price isn't so important to Bill Gates". Bezos’ critics have said that the extent of customer-centricism of the company is about the same as any other company. In other words, Bezos has been seen as generating hype and nothing much else. However, Bezos’ vision has been translated into a large customer base and loyalty rate. Amazon‘s customer base has grown rapidly over the past several years. Customer accounts grew from 1.5 million in December 1997 to 24.7 million in December 2001. The percentage of repeat customers increased from 64% in 1998 to 78% in 2000. In the fourth quarter of 2001, Amazon spent $7 to acquire a new customer and the average customer spending was $123. Amazon started out as an online bookseller. Indeed, to some, Amazon will always be a bookseller. Selling books on the Internet made sense at many levels. To Jeff Bezos, the main advantage was selection: "Books are incredibly unusual in one respect, and that is that there are more items in the book category than there are items in any other category by far. There are more than 3 million different titles available and active in print worldwide. When you have this huge number of titles, a couple of things start to happen. First of all, you can use computers to sort, search and organize. Second, you can create a super-valuable customer proposition that can only be done online, and that is selection. Online, you can have this vast catalogue of millions of titles, whereas in the physical world, the largest physical superstores are only about 175,000 titles, and there are only three that big". In addition, books are easy to ship since they are not bulky, they are a low value item and hence, low risk and finally, they are amenable to selling online using features such as sample chapters, table of contents, photographs, editorial reviews and customer reviews. Following its success in the book market, its foray into music was dramatic. In Amazon's first full quarter selling music CDs, it drew $14.4 million in sales, quickly edging out two-year-old online leader cdnow.com. This success has been replicated with DVDs, videos and computer games, however, it is not clear if Amazon can translate this success into products as disparate as cookware and hardware. 1 What Amazon does well Amazon was a pioneer in introducing new ways to enhance the shopping experience. The result of these innovations manifests itself in the leadership role of Amazon. 2 One-click shopping Amazon recognized that one of the most important ways in which it could add value was to reduce the transactional burden on customers. If the company could remember all relevant information about the customer, the individual could breeze through the ordering process. This also established “switching costs” making it a hassle to switch to other online stores that may or may not have any given customer's information. In a controversial move, the company also obtained a patent on its one-click shopping system and successfully stalled its usage by its rival, BarnesandNoble.com. 3 Product Review Information All products on Amazon can be reviewed. In the case of books, editorial reviews by leading magazines are provided by the company. In addition, for all products, customer reviews are available. Moreover, customers can rate each other's reviews. A rating figure is placed against each review so that customers can decide whether to read it or not. 4 E-Mail Alerts Amazon allows consumers to keep tabs on their favorite author or musician. Individuals can enter the name of their favorite author, for example, and when that person's next book comes along, Amazon e-mails the customer with an alert. In some cases, customers are alerted before the book is available to the public. 5 Recommendations The company uses collaborative filtering and other personalization techniques to recommend books and music to users. The company remembers the name of each customer and the web site greets each individual as they log in. Then, when the user picks a book, the system recommends a few other books that may be of interest. Clearly, this encourages the users to browse and buy more than what they had originally intended. 6 Wish Lists Each individual can create a wish list of items that they would like to acquire. This list is open to the world and if a friend or acquaintance wants, he or she can make sure that the items you want are ordered and sent to you. 7 The Page You Made The web site creates a special page that consists of recently viewed portions of the site. Consumers who have forgotten something that they looked at a few minutes ago can conveniently go to this page and locate the item of interest. 2 The Associates Program Amazon pioneered the concept of the associates program (also referred to as affiliate programs). The basic idea here is that satellite sites would act as traffic generators for the company. These sites would post content on their site with a link to Amazon and each site would receive a commission of 15% for any referred purchase and 5% for any other purchase made by that consumer. The company would benefit not only by traffic generation, but also by branding. Since the small sites would carry an Amazon logo, it would enhance the online presence of the company. The program itself has been quite successful with the company signing up at least 200,000 associates. 1 What Amazon doesn’t do so well Despite revenues in excess of $3 billion and making a profit of $5.8 million in the fourth quarter of 2001, Amazon still has massive cumulative operating losses. 2 Product diversification Product diversification has been pursued as a business model for two reasons: Cross selling and economies of scale. However, Amazon established a brand relationship with its first customers on the basis of being a bookseller. Books provided certain unique advantages to Amazon and moving into new product areas provided new challenges. Firstly, bulky products such as electrical goods and hardware are problematic to stock, expensive to ship and expensive to return. Secondly, and more importantly, the Amazon model is based on books. Books naturally lend themselves to reviews and sample chapters. Apart from Music, Videos and games, all other products Amazon sells do not share this characteristic. As a result, the advantage of selling them online is limited. 3 Marketing Some critics have argued that Amazon.com built a strong brand too early on, overspending on marketing and advertising. Analysis shows that marketing expenses were as high as 16.33% of net sales in the year 1997, this was reduced to 6.52% of net sales in the year 2000 and has been decreasing ever since. 1 Partnerships The basic premise of the partnering approach is to let another firm bear the risk of selling products that had unique problems in return for a share in the potential upside from such a venture. Specifically, Amazon acquired ownership stakes in many companies including Drugstore.com, HomeGrocer.com, Pets.com and Greenlight.com. These investments have proved to be disastrous with the majority going bankrupt. 2 Zshops and Auctions Amazon has recently diversified further into a store hosting business initiative (Zshops) and Amazon Auctions. The results are yet to be seen but the moves take it away from its core competence of retailing and presents it with new levels of cost and competition. Furthermore, the results can lead to brand confusion, muddling the answer to the question “What is Amazon and what does it stand for'”