Order Fulfillment: The Hidden Key to eCommerce Success

Amazon.com operates in the Online Retail Industry. The sector is one of the fastest growing globally and is outperforming the ordinary retail marketplace. It was created after 1995 and it was only the Internet that made it possible for such an industry not only to be established but to become one of the most flourishing sectors in the business environment. What is interesting is that Amazon.com, together with eBay is the pioneer in the field. Both companies were launched in 1995 and are still extremely successful. The creation of e-mail in 1996 had a huge impact on the development of online retail by introducing a fast and easy way to communicate with customers. For this two-year period Internet usage

Jeff Bezo’s began Amazon in his garage in July 1995 with three Sun workstations setting on wooden doors for tables and extension cords running from everywhere (Academy of Achievement, 2010). Right from the beginning he was a visionary leaving his well paying job as a senior vice president with D. E. Shaw to begin Amazon.com (Academy of Achievement, 2010). Being the visionary that he is he saw an opportunity prompted by the huge growth rate of internet use in a single year and ran with it never looking back. Jeff realized that the internet had “no real commerce to speak of” so he began researching possible businesses (Academy of Achievement, 2010). “After reviewing 20 mail order businesses and deciding which

Amazon has earned a great reputation in customer service for allowing customers to shop without face to face, avoiding talking to a customer’s service representative agent on the phone, everything it done online. Sales clerk does not exist, everything is ordered with a click of the mouse, and arrives extremenely quick in the mail (Cohen, 2009). Amazon at interval has gotten involved with the customers when they can have too. According to Green, H. (2009), “Amazon stands out most markedly from other companies, and helps explain how the company earned the No. 1 spot on Business Week’s customer service ranking this year”( para. 1).

Amazon.com has successfully managed to make its customers to feel that anything they could possibly want could be found on their website. Additionally, its products are marketed at a competitive price. Another important factor is their speedy delivery with their usage of UPS and FedEx (United States) and Royal Mail (United Kingdom). The company also caters for people that prefer online shopping with extra services such as Amazon Prime - a service with a yearly payment, customers are eligible for free next day delivery. Even though Amazon.com is known to be an online seller of most things, it still excels in its original market of book selling. Evidence of such is

​Competition within the internet sales industry is fierce and innovation is the way internet retailers are looking to grab the top spot. Internet retailers such as Walmart are following in the path of competitors and building fulfillment centers left and right to allow for faster delivery to customers. Many internet retailers have explored the possibilities of drone delivery, using customers to deliver products to other customers on their way home, and allowing customers to pick up products out of lockers in stores so they don’t have to wait in line; these competitive strategies internet retailers are seeking to implement illustrate how far firms are willing to go to gain the upper-hand on one another (Forbes, 2012).

Bezos’ entrepreneurial vision perceived new opportunities in the rapid growing usage of the Internet. He believed a 2300 percent increase in web trafficking every year could develop into a new sphere of commerce. After reviewing top mail order business, Bezos discovered that no mail order catalogue existed for selling books. Big name libraries like Barnes and Nobel considered that a catalogue including all the feature titles would need thousand of pages therefore making it expensive to mail. Bezos saw an Internet database as a solution to this issue and decided to serve this unattended market by launching

Amazon.com Inc. was initiated by Jeff Bezos in 1994 after realizing the rapid rate at which the internet and websites were growing in popularity among business organizations and individuals. In 1995, the company started operating its website for selling books, videos, compact discs, computer software and computer hardware before being incorporated in1996 as an e-commerce company (Reuters, 2015). Apparently, the company offers may products and services for sale; these products include merchandise for resale products offered by third parties. In this regard the

By grafting its system of custom direct sales onto the Internet infrastructure, Dell has transformed these activities, creating an innovative and efficient procurement, production, and distribution network. The innovative advance made by Dell in deploying Internet communication as the foundation of its production network, is a process innovation. Although to some extent, the Internet has enabled Dell to create a new product -- a PC custom-configured through Internet communication -- it is the process of organizing flows of materials and information within its network, from customer order to procurement, production and delivery, by means of Internet communication, that defines the innovation at the Firm. The case supports this notion by stating “While most other PCs were sold preconfigured and pre-assembled in retail stores, Dell offered superior customer choice in system configuration at a deeply discounted price, due to the cost-savings associated with cutting out the retail middleman. Additionally, an important side-benefit of the Internet-based direct sales model was that it generated a wealth of market data the company used to efficiently forecast demand trends and carry out effective segmentation strategies. This data drove the company’s product development efforts and allowed Dell to profit from information on the value drivers in each of its key customer

Lang and Bressolles (2013) conducted a study on the “Economic Performance and Customer Expectation in e-Fulfillment Systems: A Multi-Channel Retailer Perspective”. In order to identify their findings and evaluate the economic performances on the four e-fulfillment systems, they performed a method to evaluate the theoretical and empirical points of view gathered from conducting interviews with various employees within retail companies. Based on a literature review in supply chain management and in marketing, five economic performance and four customer expectation indicators are identified.

One of America’s greatest start-up success stories is Amazon. Jeff Bezos launched the website in 1995 and he is now having revenues of $61 billion. At the start of e-commerce, Amazon was an innovator of delivering supreme customer service, which at that times was very rare. Amazon is an illustration of massive organising skills, the company sells an enormous range of products, all day, every day, for 365 days a year and is able to maintain over 80 warehousing and fulfilment centres.

According to Turban and King (2003), internet technology renders retailers an additional channel for branding, transactions and customer relationship management, the adaptation of which may drive down retailers’ transaction costs, and ensuring faster and higher quality of customer interactions, resulting in enlarging the existing markets and consumer base. M&S realizes this and have tried to sell clothing via high street stores as well as via internet though they have experienced cost cutting, rationalisation and management changes in order to revive their business in recent years. Internet technology might enable sustainable competitive advantage, but problems remain on how to physically organize their online retail operations.

In 2002 Amazon launched a web services platform. Perhaps it was risky for a young company that had only reached profitability in that same year to invest its innovation resources in new business models rather than stick to its core, but within five years the site used by Amazon 's web-services platform had grown into the seventh-largest in the world. And Amazon kept going. In late 2007, it set up Lab126, whose first product, the Kindle e-book reader, came to market wrapped in a business model not only foreign to Amazon 's DNA but also potentially disruptive to the entire publishing industry. To launch this high-margin, product-based offering, Amazon had to become an original equipment manufacturer (OEM). It wrapped this technology in a seamlessly integrated iTunes-type digital media platform that combined both transaction- and subscription-based content delivery. It partnered with content producers in innovative ways and created an open back-end that allowed independent publishers to generate new content for the Kindle. In its first year, Amazon sold an estimated 500,000 Kindle. Amazon has greatly expanded the market for e-books and positioned itself for success not only in this market but in newspaper and periodical distribution as well. Amazon at its roots is built to transform. When it finds opportunities to serve new customers, or existing customers in new ways, it conceives and builds new business models to exploit them. Amazon has

A steady increase in the popularity of online sales has caused a major push towards e-commerce in the retail industry.

Compare the other retailers, logistics is an essential problem in e-commerce and e-business. Over country shipping and one-day shipping are more and more popular in the past years, like Amazon one day shipping, Amazon fresh keeps food in a good condition and deliver in a specific time. Retail leaders Amazon started same-day deliveries and drone shipping careers in 2015, but it hasn't expanded to all industry. The customer's satisfaction degree is closely connected with delivery ability, which makes the logistic problem more important.

With the proliferation of communication and information technology, particularly the Internet, most business organizations have been at the forefront to join the e-commerce platform. Amazon is considered as one of the existing and largest e-business platform in the world. This report outlines Amazon’s strategic intent and key resources and capabilities. In addition, the report will also include an analysis of the company 's assets and capabilities that have provided it a sustainable competitive edge as well as, the recommended future strategy of the giant online organization. Amazon defines its line of business operations based on product and service sales, fulfillment, digital content subscriptions, publishing, and co-branded cards. The company 's line of business is defined as an online store, Internet service provision, and the Kindle ecosystem. This project will explore the truth that has made the online company to be considered as the top online retailer, which mainly focuses on strategy. This report also outlines how inventories play a fundamental role in the organization 's business or corporate strategy. The other issues covered in the report include the approach used by the online company deal with the supply chain and the reason behind fast shipping fast. The paper will outline the finance statute of the company and whether the finance effect will bar the organization from developing in future. In order to achieve the answer to the questions