Amazon Case Study Essay

Amazon understood firsthand that the competitive advantage of a company originates immediately from how distinctive the organization's resources and competencies are. Amazon is able to both engage in production at a lower cost and generate a superior product at a standard cost. This is accomplished mostly via Amazon's strategy of having a wide variety of goods and competitive pricing. Customers know they can find basic products at slashed prices or high quality goods at standard prices and this is all achieved via the enormous range of products and product brands and types available on their massive marketplace. For example, the depiction displayed in the case study which shows how growth was related directly to: lower cost structure- lower prices customer experience traffic sellers -selection and convenience. While this is a grave oversimplification of the Amazon business model, it demonstrates how many aspects of the strategy reinforced one another.

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

Both Amazon and Walmart are seeking to accomplish the same goal, to become the world’s largest retailer by providing customers with a seamless shopping experience. Both companies have their own strengths, with Amazon being the leader in the online retail space, while Walmart is the clear leader in the brick-and-mortar arena. As more online and brick-and-mortar retailers are eating into the market, both Amazon and Walmart must content with other companies as well as each other. Amazon and Walmart were both created and detonated extraordinary growth due to an innovative push unlike any other in their own respective arenas. “If either Amazon or Walmart is destined to come out on top, it must come from a massive innovation push, a willingness to

Amazon’s fulfillment centers are valuable, rare, costly to imitate, and organized to captured value. Thus, they attribute to Amazon’s competitive advantage. Amazon Prime and 1-Click are also valuable to the organization. However, they can be replicated. Walmart launched a membership program to compete with Amazon’s Prime Service. With Walmart’s membership program customers receive free two-day shipping when they spend $35 or more on orders. Amazon Web Services is valuable, rare, costly to imitate and the organization has capture the value of it. Therefore, AWS has contributed to Amazon’s sustainable advantage. Amazon’s brand name and reputation have also given the company sustainable advantage. Amazon acquired enormous brand valuation in a short period of time. It is

One of the companies that exploits opportunities and business ventures to create growth and sustainability is Amazon, Inc. Amazon was founded in 1994 and since then it has opted to take its business online and thus develop a global strategy that has paid off and turned the company into a technological business hub that serves consumers by offering an assortment of products and services in a noteworthy customer service. These strategies have made Amazon one of the leading online retailers with a revenue of US$ 88.988 billion as of 2014. This paper thus seeks to describe Amazon’s grand strategies of product development, market development, and concentration as part of its long-term growth strategy.

Amazon.com is a customer centric company. They put more effort in improving their system to make the experience of customer more comfortable so that he keeps on returning to the website. Jeffery Bezos who is the founder of the Amazon.com started this company after seeing the use of internet increasing rapidly.

Amazon Web Services is a cloud computing platform which was to provide online services to websites (Rouse, 2014). Amazon is comprised of software development and customer service centers around the world (Rouse, 2014). At Amazon, workers are encouraged to tear apart one another’s ideas in meetings, toil long and late and held to unreasonably high standards (Kantor & Streitfeld, 2015).

It provides a structure to capture the linkage of organizational activities that create value for the customer and profit for the organisation. It is particularly useful to get across the notion that operations and the other activities must work cross functionally for optimal organization performance(Chase et al. 2007).

Many consumers go for what appears to be cheapest and most convenient. The reality is, Amazon’s increasing dominance comes with high costs. “These consequences have gone largely unnoticed thanks to Amazon’s remarkable invisibility and the way its tentacles have quietly extended their reach” (LaVecchia, 2016). It is vital that consumers are aware of this superpower that is taking over.

The company I have chosen to write about is Amazon. Amazon, was launched on July 16, 1995 by founder Jeff Bezos in his two-car garage in Bellevne, Washington. When Amazon first launched as a website that only sold books, but Jeff Bezos wanted Amazon to be much more than a bookstore, he wanted it to be an everything store. This paper will answer the required questions listed below:

The company understood the high importance of smooth and easy order process for their customers. Any obstacles could result in potential customers not being able to purchase the product and eventually leaving the website, which would lead to Amazon not making profit.

Amazon stated its marketing approach in its 2011 annual report as “we direct customers to our websites primarily through a number of targeted online marketing channels, such as our associated program, sponsored search, portal advertising, email marketing campaigns, and other initiatives.”(Petro, 2017). Being the leader of the ecommerce industry, Amazon maintains that

As discussed in the case study, the advertising and marketing strategy of Amazon have been focusing on how the products would gain interest from their target market and how they can be able to generate sales with their products. This is Amazon’s stronghold where it continues to yield strong sales revenue by leveraging off its excellent online shop in different locations, such as in UK and other country, strong brand name and excellent reputation among customers. Amazon has also been continuing to create affiliate websites to expand their business market among various consumers.

At a time when Amazon is breaking ground with a new business model, such disclosure can strengthen its competitors by giving an insight of its situation or strategy.

The reaction to Amazon’s marketplace initiative in the financial markets had been generally positive. Indeed, Amazon’s stock was up 52% for the year (as of mid-September 2002) versus a 35% drop in the NASDAQ index. Still, doubts clearly remained in some observers’ minds. For example, Holly Becker, an equity analyst at Lehman Brothers, had reservations about Amazon’s model. In a report issued in February 2002 she said, in part: The used business appears to be an excellent complement to Amazon’s core retail offering. The used business allows Amazon to participate in a growing market that leverages all of the inherent benefits of the Internet . . . a truly virtual model, used eliminates a large portion of fulfillment costs and inventory risk, and therefore provides higher margins . . . but . . . we believe used is detrimental to Amazon’s franchise in the long term. The company’s point of difference, market share, and service capabilities are far greater in new products than used . . . we believe cannibalization is likely in the longer term.1 While the company had made dramatic strides in expanding the range of products it offered, there were still many categories in which it participated little or not at all. Thus, a key element of enhancing selection was to constantly expand the range of