Nordstrom is usually located in shopping centers, specialty centers, and central business districts. Nordstrom also has stores in both location choices to further availability to increase its target market, who prefer shopping in these two retail locations. Nordstrom allows customers to search through multiple level stores to find exactly what they want. Nordstrom also has helpful sales floor associates to guide customers to the products they want. .
INTERNAL ENVIORNMENT Constantly an “evolving machine,” Amazon’s same day delivery promises to be the next big step in e-commerce (Murray and Chu, 2015). According to an article by Business Insider, a study from L2, found that a quarter of shoppers would abandon their online cart if same-day shipping wasn’t available. Per the article, that’s a problem that most retailers face, especially since only one-fifth of retail stores offer same-day shipping at checkout. The retailers who offer same-day shipping tend to charge exceptionally high prices for the convenient service. When customers think of the word “fast shipping,” they tend to believe that means same-day shipping.
Amazon is number one in competing Walmart especially in online retailer and now opining fiscal stores starting with Amazon Campus store in 2015, available at several college campuses in US the Amazon Campus stores serve as a central hub where student retrieve deliveries from lockers and drop off returns, all free of charge. Over the past three years, while Walmart’s sales grew by 8.6 %, revenue at Amazon has nearly doubled. Then, Costco is also major competitor to Walmart, particularly to Sam’s because of its low price.
Walmart, Amazon, and EBay 1. Analyse each of these companies using the value chain and competitive forces models. The value chain model of Amazon in itself is internally and operationally the best that adds value and maintains competitive advantage. The primary activities include Inbound logistics for example quality control, receiving, raw materials, control and supply schedules; Operations for example packaging , maintenance, quality control; Outbound Logistics for example
Apple Inc. embraces diversification strategy as a means of promoting its viability in the market. Largely, the creation of the three products lines compounds the sources of the company’s income. In fact, the company does not rely on a single source of income because the product design belongs to different categories. This strategy cushions the business from suffering risks of associated with depending on a single business. According Hitt, Ireland, and Hoskisson (2014, p.135), the benefit of handling many products is that when one product fail or does poorly in the market, the business is would shift its attention of the best performing products.
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.
Analyze Amazon.com using the competitive forces and value chain models. How has it responded to pressures from its competitive environment? How does it provide value to its customers? a) Competitive forces analysis i) Entry of competitors It is easy for competitors to enter the market by establishing an e-shop and Amazon laid the groundwork for competitors (Flat World Business, n.d).
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
The business model of Amazon ensures that the product is available for the customer at the best possible price. The fast shipping strategies also ensure customer satisfaction. These aspects offer an excellent value proposition to the customer. Since Amazon is present globally and is successfully into business for a long time period, the strategies of Amazon are sustainable.
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).
Amazon is a domination force that all other retailers have to compete with and they will only get better. When they began to dominate the market, some retailers followed suit and increase their online presence like Walmart and EBay. They even began to lower their prices to compete with Amazon. This resulted in several other retailers, who did not
3.3 Customers and Competitors Customers Amazon customers consist of upper & middle class social groups who have inclination towards using E-commerce portals and are comfortable with online shopping. Majority of the customers are professionals or businessmen who are busy with their business/Job & find it convenient to purchase anything online rather than visiting the physical outlet in order to save time & money. Furthermore, the customers might also be the ones who are searching for deals.
Today, many people prefer to order products from Amazon instead of going to stores or malls. c. DESCRIPTION OF MY SUBJECT (AMAZON.COM): Amazon (Amazon.com) is the world’s largest online retailer and a prominent cloud services provider. The company was initially a book seller, then later it expanded to sell a wide variety of consumer goods and digital media as well as its own electronic devices, such as the Kindle e-book reader, Kindle Fire tablet and Fire TV, a streaming media adapter (Rouse, 2018).
The best companies in the world are discovering a powerful new source of competitive advantage. It's called supply chain management and includes all onboard activities that bring products to market and satisfied customers. The Supply Chain Management program covers topics from manufacturing operations, transportation, purchasing and physical distribution for a single program. Coordinated the successful management of the supply chain and all these activities integrated in a continuous process.
Amazon’s culture is based on employees’ competiveness, hard work and innovation. This corporate culture however brings a really stressful environment among the organization. For the past years, the company lessened the impact of a negative culture whereas the financial reports as well as the innovation were reported as the most important things. Nevertheless, organizational culture is nowadays becoming really important. It was for example seen in the Harvard Business Review when the CEO of Amazon went from one of the top ranked CEO in 2014 to the 87th position in only twelve months.
