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
The opinion piece published by the Los Angeles Times, “Amazon.com Is a 21st Century Deal with the Devil,” by Amy Koss states her central argument that Amazon is destroying jobs, malls, and stores in the outside world. I strongly disagree with the statement that Amazon is destroying jobs and stores because I believe Amazon brings convenience by allowing people to sell things they might not need that others do. According to Koss,” I also think that it is at the convenience of consumers who have a difficult time going outside because of a medical issue or if they’re just lazy because of the fact that they can order something and have it delivered to them in less than a few days with an even cheaper price tag. Online shopping on Amazon allows others to earn jobs as well because they might work from home and work for Amazon or they might deliver items to the consumer. Some people may even start their own online selling business on Amazon.
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.
Amazon’s faults Amazon is killing America’s economy and is destroying retail companies everywhere. A lot of America’s finance situation is in the hands of Amazon. The website is developing a monopoly over almost every retail company. This creates a real threat to America's jobs. In fact, over the span of a two month period, over 60,000 retail jobs were lost.
Everyone has a favorite store that they prefer to shop at like Wal-Mart, Target, and BestBuy to name a few. However, when talking about favorite big name stores, Amazon can’t be left out of the equation. Amazon was founded in 1994 which put it as the youngest of retailers. However, with the boom of modern technology and internet, Amazon is now one of the biggest name when it comes to major retailers and is still continuing to grow bigger every year.
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
In just a month of its establishment Amazon was selling books to all 50 states of the US and Canada. From the onset the company had ambitions of being an “everything store” (funding universe, 2004). Over the years Amazon increased its offerings to include DVDs, electronics, furniture and other consumer goods (Amazon.com, 2015). The product range increase was accompanied by a series of acquisitions. Oliva et al (2003) describes Amazon to be using a get big fast (GBF) strategy which is premised on keeping prices low while expanding market
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.
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 suppliers have low bargaining power since the company is large and can compel the suppliers to offer discounts for the popular titles. v) Entry by rivals Although rivals can enter the market of Amazon, the company has already reached the biggest global marketplace and there are many visitors to its website. b) Value chain model analysis Value chain refers to the activities which create value and competitive advantage for a company. For Amazon, these activities are shown in the model below; Amazon value chain model by Dudovskiy, J. (
Investors in Wal-Mart were aware of the obstacles that the giant retailer would face due to the changing consumer preferences and behaviors. However, the financial reports showcased that its online strategy was successful. At the end of the second quarter in 2017, Wal-Mart reported revenue of $123.4 billion, which was an increment of about 2.1% over the previous year quarter. There was also an increase in comparable sales by 1.8% year over year. Wal-Mart has significantly focused on structuring its online sales, while using its already well-established brick and mortar stores and excellent supply chain and logistics to its big advantage.
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’s major guide has been its strategy for low cost and effective innovations gaining advantage over its competitors. Amazon’s established strategies can be deemed suitable and successful and thus making it dominating player in the market. This dominance may very well continue as Amazon explores new innovative products and
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).
