According to Amy Koss in a Los Angeles Times opinion piece, Amazon.com is a “21st century deal with the devil”. Koss believes such online retailers such as Amazon.com looks good on paper but in reality, are harmful to local retailer mom and pop stores, and equally harmful to the titans of the retail world, such as Sears, Macys, Radio Shack, and Men’s Warehouse. Koss states that the “Satan” of today relies on easy consumption to win our souls. Koss then goes on to explain how Amazon hooks the masses into its vast online catalog of everyday items, most of which are unneeded, but has them radially available in a sleek looking web page layout that turn the laziness and greed of the masses to their wallets to buy everything they could every want
Amazon was founded in 1995. Amazon was originally an electronic bookstore online. Later, the company expanded and provided DVDs, CDs, MP3, games, apparel, jewelry, furniture, and most recently food to sell online. Amazon was able to find a deficiency in the market and started a company filling that deficiency. Today, Amazon is in the top five largest and most important companies in the world, only following Apple, Google, and Microsoft.
The company was founded in the 1990s during the boom of the internet and focused on selling books and computer hardware. They were on the forefront of the e-commerce business and now manage to sell around 480 million products in the USA. This company is very recently in the news for announcing it will be creating a grocery store that has no cashiers. We became interested in the stock because cyber monday was coming up and we were expecting Amazon to have an increase in sales.
It was initially a website that sold only books, but Bezos had a much bigger vision. He started in his basement and within the first month had sold books to every 50 states along with over 45 countries. The growth continued over the next several years which made it a website that pretty much sold anything. This created some issues because of the fast growth with employees working
The best example of a core firm to Amazon is Ebay. Ebay started off as an online retailer that allowed users to sell used items to other users. Recently Ebay has been used as a retailer for manufactured goods as well. Amazon has also started selling used goods in a way similar to how Ebay always has. Both companies have been strategizing to become more like the other and this has brought them to be the most similar online retailers.
Although Standard Oil was eventually disbanded, it made JDR not only a billionaire, but supposedly the richest person to ever live. Nearly 120 years after the founding of Standard Oil, a new company was established called Amazon. Amazon was founded on May 15, 1997 by Jeff Bezos (Hartman). Amazon began as an online bookstore, but is now known as the website that sells all products “from A to Z” (Hartman). After expanding, Amazon has topped almost all markets, making Jeff Bezos a billionaire to rival Rockefeller.
The total profit accumulated was $377.00 from a quantity of 100 shares. The reason for this is because many of the features the company offers is the future of our generation. Over the last year, it increased the stock price past 50%, hit on March 31; the last day of the competition. The cause of this is because of the increase in sales through Amazon which grew 23% in the first quarter of 2017 and the company’s profit which increased by 41%. Other factors that influenced the company’s overall growth are that they can appeal to more consumers - starting from solely selling books to offering almost anything one could imagine.
Businesses are continuously trying to come up with ways to make purchasing products easier and more appealing to consumers. With Millennials beginning to outnumber the amount of baby boomers, e-business is increasing rapidly. “Of the 310 million people making up the American population, 239 million use the Internet” (Business, 476). As time passes, less consumers are purchasing products directly from the store and are switching to online shopping, which is beginning to cause problems for suppliers, especially with the use of voice-search assistants such as Alexa.
We will also look at how Amazon builds trust with their customers to keep them coming back to shop. Additionally, this paper will analyze the internal strengths and weaknesses of each company and their strategies used to increase profitability and efficiency. By using each companies balance sheet, income statements, and financial ratio we will be able to see how each company is performing and if they are staying ahead of the competition. After looking at all aspects of both companies functionalities, we can the make recommendations of ways to improve their competitive advantage so that the companies continue to be front runners in their competitive markets. Mid-Term Exam Industry Overview
Amazon was by far the greatest e-commerce performer in terms of revenue in 2013 as reported by (Wireless News, 2014). One of the company’s many accolades is that it has the seventh most visited website in the world (alexa, 2015). Compared to its competitors, meaning companies that are offering similar services, it is number one. The position occupied by Amazon in the market warrants a study of the company and its businesses model.
Amazon’s competitive strategy is cost leadership. Amazon has achieved a lot on a great scale that it gets the best prices from its vendors so they can operate in very flexible and thin margins and sell their items easily at retail prices and make money. They also provide shipping products for a reasonable cheap price. They also have improved their warehouses by giving some space to other sellers who want to sell their items through Amazon. They differentiate and provide better quality than their competitors across the industry.
Inc., n.d.). In 1994, when Amazon was founded it was running out of the founder Jeff Bezos’ garage, making $20,000 per week in profit. Recently in 2014, Amazon has acquired the title of “The Everything Store” with 154,100 full time employees working for it, and it earned $90 billion in revenue. Amazon has broadened its market by allowing sellers to sell their new and used items along with Amazon products, giving customers the option to choose a product that matches their affordability (shorr,
5 – Main risks going forward for Amazon.com are to loose its competitive advantage because of opportunities that Internet offered to its competitor : low prices, deliver, costumer’s service, etc. Moreover, if the business develops, it may encounter logistical problems and limits : geographical and logistical constraints (energy, delivery and connection and some contries) and legislative constraints (censorship, taxes and state agreement : Corea, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, etc). Founded in 1994, Amazon started as an online bookstore and quickly became popular as it received high marks on several Internet rankings. Today, Amazon.com, Inc. is the world's largest online retailing company headquartered in Seattle, WA
But the huge investments for it can be risky, due to low profit margins and sales reduction can cause effects on cash flow or new technology investments. Conclusion Amazon.com has been strong and steady since its foundation. Jeff Bezos openly claimed the mission statement to be the guiding force behind his decisions. It can be believed that the success of Amazon.com has been due to mostly, if not totally, their unwavering commitment to its mission and its implementation.
Amazon has achieved many milestones from starting in the founder’s garage in 1994 to the growth in revenue to US$147.8 million in 1997 and then to the revenue growth of US$177.866 billion in 2017 (Amazon, 2018a, Amazon, 2018b and Jurevicius, 2018). These milestones were achieved through tenacious focused strategies of meeting their customers’ needs and wants. These strategies have maintained and expanded their customer base locally and internationally and have increased its market shares and profit over the last two decades. In addition, projection for the company’s growth and expansion for the next three to five years looks positive as it predicted to grow at the same rate with its expansion internationally and continued focused in satisfying consumers’ wants (Amazon, 2018a). Although, some factors such as governmental policies, legal issues and natural disasters could pose a threat to Amazon’s growth plans, the management team led by the founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) are working on mitigating the risk (Amazon, 2018a).
