Amazon case study Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Amazon case study - Essay Example Since July 1995 when it began, Amazon.com has enjoyed a 30 percent increase in business every month. Industry analysts believe the company is grossing up to $12 million a year. This was in spite of the fact that up until recently Amazon.com was not turning a profit. (Horvitz 1997: 37) Bezos believed the power of the Internet lay in continuous communication and word of mouth, which made branding even more important. As a result he chose to name his site after the world’s largest river, believing Amazon.com would become the biggest bookstore in the world. (Stockport & Ivory 2004: 648) He was somewhat mistaken. Now amazon.com has not only become one of the largest bookstores in the world but it is also one of the largest on-line retailers for just about everything both new and used worldwide. As mentioned previously one of the main driving forces for Amazon.com’s strategic intent in the marketplace was to be the biggest provider of goods and services to the largest amount of customers. This required a great deal of planning and certain focus to bring it all together. A central tenet of Amazon.com’s strategy, therefore, had been the customer-focused innovation designed to improve the convenience of the online shopping experience. This had included offering the world’s biggest collection of goods and services in a vast array of categories (Stockport & Ivory 2004: 648) They achieved this by paying very close attention to the needs of their customers and putting in place the strategic technologies and the support services necessary to do so. They completed this strategy but a great deal more was needed in order to keep up with the technological changes that were happening in leaps and bounds as well as keeping pace with the changing marketplace around them. They experienced ‘first mover’ growth between 1994 and 1997, but the competition was soon piling up, companies such as Barnes & Nobel as well as E-bay