Amazon Case Study Paper

Amazon is a Fortune 500 e-commerce company based in Seattle, WA. It is one of the top companies that sells the most goods over the internet.

It can be served as a competitive advantage, which attracts more customers shifting from Amazon’s online retailer competitors into buying their products, thus increasing the market share.

How would you define Amazon’s industry? What difficulties do you encounter identifying primary competitors and key lines of business?

Amazon.com was founded in 1994, it started by selling books online. As it grew, the company started offering various products and services. Some goods include: DVDs, videos, electronics, camera and photography, clothing apparels, shoes, and so forth. Other retailers have merged with Amazon.com to offer diverse quality of items based on different degrees of usage, such as new, refurbished, and used items. The company 's headquarter is in Seattle, Washington. It has six global websites that serves customers that are based in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Canada, and Japan. Their website features: e-mail order verification, customer review on products, and one-click shopping.

The VRIO Frameworks permits to see which tangible and intangible resources give Amazon its superior performance. The company has a competitive advantage over its rivals as Amazon focuses on its customers. Amazon offers a wide array of selection of goods at various prices to its millions of customers. Amazon has been able to keep this competitive advantage by leveraging its resources. For the resources to attribute to competitive advantage they must pass the VRIO framework. The VRIO framework states that a resource must be valuable, rare, costly to imitate, and organized to captured value. Each of Amazon’s tangible and intangible resources are evaluated to see which meet the above criteria.

Amazon is a company we all know and love. The company is widely known for its online retail shopping, it’s popular Kindle Series with e-bookstore, along with their cloud and order fulfillment services amongst many other things. Amazon has become a great example of a perfect collaboration system and utilizing all of its information systems. With the vast history of Amazon we can begin to ask certain questions that would help understand Amazon and its continual success in innovating: How does Amazon, as a company show their ability and willingness to collaborate, experiment, perform systems and abstract thinking? These questions and more will be further explained in this case study.

As we have learned in this program, innovation gives organizations a competitive advantage. Organizations that don’t move along with innovation and stay stagnant will perish, in the long run. According to Robert M. Grant’s Contemporary Strategy Analysis book, “competitive advantage is not only innovation in technology but also strategic innovation such as developing new approaches to doing business, creating value for customers from novel products, experiences, or modes of product delivery.” An example of this kind of innovation is Ikea and its new system of supplying customers that has reconfigured its entire value chain.

Amazon (AMZN) is a multi-national company that offers a large range of products, from food to clothing, through its website. The company was incorporated in May of 1996 and has three major divisions; North America, International, and Amazon Web Services (AWS). Amazon North America focuses on selling customer products through a B2B and B2C format. Using Amazon.com, individuals can advertise a variety of products for sale, and another consumer can buy the products right off the webpage. Most of us are familiar with how Amazon works and what distinguishes it from its many competitors. Currently, Amazon has expanded from solely ecommerce to technology. Most recently they have released household products such as Amazon Echo, Amazon Fire Stick and the Amazon Dash button.

This case analysis serves the purpose to provide an analytical framework to evaluate Amazon.com from an internal and external perspective, and to provide strategic direction based upon the internal and external evaluation. The case will begin with an introduction to Amazon.com.

As executives of Amazon examined its online retailer business, they realized a growing trend in cloud computing to innovate and build dynamic capabilities to create a competitive advantage that provides value for the consumers. Amazon Web Services (AWS) was first conceived to deliver web services capabilities for developers to leverage as building blocks, however, as its services matured, enterprises are now using the AWS platform as a feasible solution and novelty to quickly deploy applications without procuring infrastructure. Moreover, by understanding business drivers, AWS was able to reinvent its strategy through a process cycle of exploitations and enhancements to be relevant and complementary atop the industry. Equally, I believe a nurturing culture with discipline and patience helped AWS to be the dominate leader in the cloud computing Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) ecosystem.

Zappos, as the first and the world’s largest online shoes retailer, has developed a high quality experience and delivered “wow” to customers. It has established a strong relationship with customer and stick to bring the store to the customer’s home. It has used less twenty yeas to become a profitable company holding an outstanding reputation for customer service and its employee are passionately engage in their works. In this paper, I aimed to analyze the relationship between strategic capabilities and performance in Zappos’s success. The business environment is not constant rather than changeable, so how Zappos goes ahead of revival and forms its unique competency advantages. I will utilize VRIO test to detect the company’s level of competitive advantage. In addition, I will continually combine Barney’ theory of resource based view(RBV) with Zappos to identified which resources it processes and how Zappos used those to form its core competency.

Amazon is a multi-billion dollar organization, thus you can make however much as could reasonably be expected through their associate advertising programs. When you join as an Amazon Associate, you can begin producing subsidiary connections quickly and advance it on your blog or any of the 100s of online networking locales. To be an expert partner advertiser relies upon many components.

Amazon purchased a firm, Kiva Systems, they produce Kiva robots that help in fulfilling operations. Kiva robots are squat, 320lb, orange colored, rounded-rectangles on wheels. The robots are able to carry shelves of stacked goods up to 750lb. Then the shelves are taken away and the Kiva robots bring back the shelves if there’s an item needed for a customer order. Having Kiva robots place inventory on shelves speeds up the inventory process, minimizes mistakes and allows each items location in the

In 2000, Amazon and Toys-R-Us entered into a symbiotic agreement that would benefit both corporate entities. Both companies had recently had unimpressive fiscal years due to differing issues. Toys “R” Us struggled with poor order fulfillment. Although they were equipped with enough merchandise, other issues kept them from being able to get orders to customers in a timely manner; especially during the busy holiday season. Conversely, Amazon was forced to write off $34 million because of a miscalculation in inventory and had orders that could not be honored (Ouchi, 2004). Following these debacles, both organizations felt that joining

Jeff Bezos looked out the open doorway of his office and stared at the “problem of the day,” which his assistant Sarah had posted on the whiteboard in the hallway. It was Friday, September 13, 2002, and the whiteboard read: ”You have 10 bottles with 100 pills each in them. In nine of the bottles, each pill weighs 10 mg. In one bottle, each pill weighs 9 mg. These pills are poisonous. You have a digital scale that reads out in mg. Can you determine which bottle contains the poison with only one weight measurement?” Bezos—founder, chairman, and CEO of Amazon.com—normally enjoyed trying to solve these brainteasers. But today his mind