...Amazon Evolution Jeff Bezos created a company called Amazon.com in July 1995 by employing retail sales over the Internet. Jeff Bezos started the company, offering books for sale based from an Internet website. Now Amazon offers a vast selection, low prices, easy product search and ordering, detailed product information, and secure payment transactions while providing optimal efficiency in order product delivery (Turban, 2006). The business of Amazon has changed dramatically after the cyber store launched. Amazon is looking to become a platform for other cyber-stores, and the world’s store on the Internet. Amazon rates the best cyber-store on the content on the site and service. Other web merchants want to become a partner with Amazon for site development and back-end logistics help. According to Friedman (2004), “Amazon.com has limitless shelf space. Because they are more on an online catalog than a retail store, Amazon does not have to stock the entire inventory they offer. The downside to this is that you do not get to leave the store with your purchase in hand. In fact, depending on the availability of the item you order you may have to wait a few weeks! The upshot is that they can offer anything and everything – so you get an infinitely larger selection of goods. Customers are an integral part of Amazon’s sales force. Because Amazon is web based, they automatically have a place to post extensive product information, including customer reviews. When you are...
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...Amazon Evolution Your Name XBIS/219 Date Instructor Amazon Evolution Amazon (www.amazon.com) is the largest online retailer in the United States. Many people around the world go to amazon.com and find virtually anything they are searching for. In the beginning, Amazon’s initial strategy was becoming the largest online bookseller. Their plan was based on a combination of things, such as: a need in the marketplace for discount books, providing these books at discounts when purchased in bulk, and run the business without the same staff required at a traditional book store. Amazon.com very quickly caught on to people was looking for cheaper books, especially the college students. At that time, eBay was the primary way of buying other products online. Amazon changed the strategy of the business to make better uses of the company’s capabilities. The strategy was to make use of the extra 90 percent of the company’s processing capacity and improve revenue by offering computing, storage, and other technical services to businesses as well as individuals. This was a very smart move on their part. This was not the original purpose of the business; however, there was constant changing in the market and new competitive online retailers that they had to diversify the business. The new strategy took Amazon in a new direction that allowed them to compete in a broader business market. Three of the services offered are the Simple Storage Service (S3), the Elastic Compute...
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...Amazon Evolution Melanie Fonseca XBIS/219 July 1, 2012 Venkatash Baglodi Amazon Evolution Amazon is not doing as well as most people may think even though they are the biggest online retailer carrying an excess of annual sales of $10 billion. Amazon has not shown a steady profit growth that investors have been expecting of them, and it is has fallen so much that their profit margin is only about 4.1 percent less than that of Wal-Mart’s at 5.9 percent (Rainer & Turner, 2008). This is not the only problem Amazon is facing. Competition is becoming larger for Amazon with all these other web sites popping up and becoming preferred number one stops for consumers. Search engines like Google have replaced Amazon as the first stop to go shopping on the web. Amazon has come up with a strategy to help with these problems they are facing. Back in 2007 Amazon spent a lot of money and years developing their infrastructure for their online store. This infrastructure is one of the largest and most reliable around today in the world (Rainer & Turner, 2008). This infrastructure is very large but Amazon only uses about 10% of its processing capacity at any given time. Because of this Amazon has come up with the idea of providing services that make its infrastructure available to other companies and people that will help them with running the technical and logistical sides of their businesses (Rainer & Turner, 2008). This strategy seems like a good one because Amazon...
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...Amazon Evolution ± Team B Outline (Week 2) Begin working on the Amazon.com® Evolution paper by reading Amazon: From Book Seller to Service Provider in Ch. 1 of Introduction to Information Systems. 1. Discuss whether the company is moving away from its core competency of being a leading online retailer. Evaluate the offerings of Google and Microsoft®, identify in which areas Amazon.com® is competing, and discuss whether this is a wise strategy Although Amazon is the largest leading online retailer, according to the Amazon.com case study, they are utilizing only 10% of their processing capacity. Therefore, they have decided to enhance their profit margin by encompassing the utilization of the remaining infrastructure already put into place, to increase their profit margin. By offering services to smaller companies that they are already paying for, and using the unutilized infrastructure space to do so. Therefore, they are not moving away from their core competency they are enhancing it. As a matter of fact, it seems as though they are capitalizing on two things: The infrastructure they have that is already bought and paid for and their superior data management expertise. Although expanding your business always entails risk, I think they are moving in a direction in which they have considerable expertise. Google is in direct competition with Amazon but they are not an online retailer. They are a B2B operating as an online referral service. Microsoft, also is a services support business...
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...Amazon Evolution Rhonda Johnson BIS/219 Due February28, 2011 Professor Stuart McCubbrey Describe How Amazon.com uses e-business and e-commerce for B2B and B2C. E-Commerce describes the process of buying, selling, transferring, or exchanging products, services or information via computer networks, including internet. E-Business is a somewhat broader concept. In addition to the buying and selling of goods and services e-business also refers to servicing customers, collaborating with business partners, and performing electronic transactions within an organization. (Rainer and Turban 2008 chapter 6) Amazon.com uses only 10 percent of its processing capacity at any one time. The company has decided to provide a series of computing, storage and other services that make its infrastructure available to companies and individuals to help them run the technical and logistical parts of their businesses. (Rainer and Turban2008). These are examples of how amazon.com uses e-business and e-commerce for B2B and B2C. Three of the services are the services are the Simple storage service (S3) The Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and The Mechanical Turk. Amazon.com charges Businesses to store data and applications, which gives amazon.com profit for doing so, but also saves other businesses money by working with amazon.com. Amazon.com uses e-businesses and e-commerce for B2C as well. By using the businesses storage business those individual businesses offer jobs to regular people...
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...Amazon Evolution July 26, 2011 XBIS/219 Instructor: Angelina Shelton Amazon.com started out as being a large-scale online book store, but has since expanded itself to include a more complex and vast directory of products and services available to its consumers. From the beginning, Amazon pledged to “revolutionize retailing,” but some analysts wonder if the company will ever be able to successfully fulfill that promise (Introduction To Information Systems). Although Amazon’s company averages over $10 billion dollars per year, its profitable growth has not been a consistent climb. With competition between other companies such as Google steadily increasing left and right, Amazon has had to become more strategic by offering even more services than had originally been planned at the business’s origin. Although it may have started out being an online bookstore, Amazon now provides certain services to individuals and businesses “to help them run the technical and logistical [components] of their business” (Introduction To Information Systems). The Simple Storage Service (S3), the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), and the Mechanical Turk are some of the most popular services that Amazon.com has available to its business-minded consumers. Through the Simple Storage Service, Amazon is able to charge businesses who store data and applications to Amazon disk drives 15 cent per gigabyte for each month. One company using the S3 service is webmail.us, which sends Amazon over a terabyte...
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...Amazon Evolution Axia College Amazon.com's initial strategy was to become the largest online bookseller in the United States. Their plan was based on a combination of business ingenuity, fitting a newly created need in the marketplace for discount books, and being able to provide these books at a significant enough discount due to their ability to buy in bulk and run their business without the same staff required of a traditional book store. Amazon.com quickly caught on to those looking for cheaper books, especially amongst college students. At the time, the only primary way of buying other types of goods online was through EBay, which could involve a time consuming arduous process, and could cause an individual to pay a substantial premium on the goods they were going to purchase. Furthermore, it was difficult if someone were otherwise occupied, for instance, with employment to stay attuned to the deal and not lose it to another individual merely because he was working at the time. EBay attempted to fulfill this need through Half.com, but it did not really catch on like Amazon. Just like other bookstores, Amazon quickly moved into other media, such as movies videogames, and other forms of entertainment, especially those visually based. Once Amazon realized that it was making such a substantial profit through selling books and the other forms of medium that it sold on its website, it seems like the Executives came to the logical conclusion that the website would be...
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...Amazon Evolution According to Kate Mulqueen, Amazon has identified their core competencies as customer convenience and accessibility, massive selection, personalized service, quality of the site content, quality of its search tools, and price (Mulqueen, 2010). They are building competencies in the new markets of online auctions, electronics, greeting cards, and customization of customer needs. They are developing new core competencies in the new markets of e-commerce by financially allying themselves with Internet technology companies such as Exchange.com, Accept.com and Alexa.com, which are developing tools for the Internet marketplace. They are continuing to leverage and grow their existing core competencies by expanding the services and selections they offer readers, music listeners, and game players. The company is not currently shedding any obsolete competencies and may not be at the place in their growth cycle to have any currently obsolete competencies (Mulqueen, 2010). On the surface, it may appear that Amazon is moving away from their core competency of being a leading online retailer; however, it seems that Amazon is on target and they are adding to their portfolio. Amazon’s strategy to offer IT solutions to help other companies with their technical and logistical parts of their business is a stable way for Amazon to remain a marketable Internet organization. Amazon has several components of their database. They sell books, movies; music, computers, groceries...
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...Amazon Evolution BIS/219 Amazon Evolution Introduction Moving away from its core competency? Amazon is not steering itself away from being the leading online retailer, in fact, it is not leading the industry; it is paving a new road. Amazon began simply as an online bookstore; it has evolved in the last 15 years to range from books to movies, latest technologies, and even food. Amazon set out to be the leading online retailer of books; they have now accomplished being the leading online retailer of most every product. With every business, getting started can be difficult but if the momentum is ever taken hold the company must run with it. This is what Amazon has done; they started out having a tough time with the name “Cabrera” which could have sometimes been mistaken as “Cadaver.” That was when the founder decided to name the site based on what he imagined it would become. That was where the name “Amazon” came from, because it is the largest river in the country, they wanted this website to be the largest retail website. So far, not slowing down one bit, mission accomplished and Amazon is continuing the momentum. Amazon has also high dreams of broadening their horizons in many more countries and even opening up their selection of products. Competing with Google™ and Microsoft® Amazon’s database Amazon is one of the largest organizations that has product information database in the world. Amazon has thousands of customers with thousands of products and as well...
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...Amazon Evolution Lisa Marie Kostka XBIS/219 March 6, 2011 Shawn Rieder Amazon Evolution While Amazon remains the leading online retailer, there are some who will challenge whether or not the organization has shifted its core competencies. In the beginning Amazon was merely a resource for consumers to buy books at a reasonable cost without ever having to go to a store. This provided consumers with a way to get what they want for a reasonably small shipping fee without ever having to leave their house. For the most part, these competencies are still intact; however, the focus has expanded in terms of products and services. The economic climate has affected businesses all around the world; Amazon is not different. Their approach now is to offer additional services such as Simple Storage Services (S3), Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), and the Mechanical Turk. (Rainer & Turner, 2008). The S3 has been developed to offer businesses a way to store data on Amazon disks which is another form of disaster recovery in a sense. The EC2 offers customers a way to use Amazons processing power; this is charged at an hourly rate. Mechanical Turk is a bundled service that combines processing power and people to help monitor traffic that takes place online. This strategic move will do one of two things; set them apart from other online retailers or bury them in costs if not managed wisely. One particular area is data management. Although many organizations have reached out to...
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...Amazon Evolution Paper Amazon .com is one of the largest online retailers. In recent years, Amazon has shown its intention to broaden its core competency to become a more diverse online retailer by adding computing and storage services to its product base. In this paper the team will address whether Amazon’s strategy is a good one. The team will also describe how Amazon uses each component of a database, review the data management issues encountered by Amazon, share how Amazon addresses the relationship between data, information, and knowledge and lastly, describe how Amazon uses both e-business and e-Commerce for B2B and B2C. The components of a database and how Amazon uses each. Databases are comprised of four different aspects – tables, forms, queries, and reports. Tables are a group of rows and columns that make up the entire database. They are made of information can be “entered, edited, stored, and reviewed” (Mickey, 2005). Amazon uses tables to keep records of users and sales. For example, Amazon would use tables to keep records of a user’s credit card number, address, and age, as well as a record of purchases and sales made by that user. This information would be kept in the Amazon’s database track what kinds of purchases and sales the user makes, and to deliver the products to the user. Forms are used to “enter, view, and edit data” (Mickey, 2005). According to Chris Cruikshank (1999) “The form should have some form of validation so that the user...
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...Amazon Evolution Amazon.com was founded by Jeffrey P. Bezos in July 1995 with the online sale of a single book. By 1998, Bezos had expanded the company's selection of titles to more than 3.1 million. He also implemented personal greets and additional title recommendations to online shoppers. Soon Amazon was selling CD's, videos, electronic games, toys, and more. Criticism intensified. Analysts said Amazon was selling too many items, and it would eventually fail. Many new strategies have evolved Amazon into "a sort of Windows for e-commerce, allowing Web developers to sync up with Amazon's e-commerce software much more intimately" (Hof, 2011). Amazon's infrastructure is now available on the open market. They provide services that help online companies run the technical and logistic parts of the company more effectively; the Simple Storage Service (S3), the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), and the Mechanical Turk. Wiley.com explains that for a monthly fee businesses use S3 to store data and applications on Amazon disk drives, and rent processing power by the hour. The Mechanical Turk combines processing power with networks of real people who are paid to do the kind of work that machines cannot do well, such as recognizing inappropriate content and transcribing audio (Wiley, unk.) These services have improved Amazon's productivity and allowed the company to remain competitive with major e-commerce giants such as Google, Microsoft, and E-bay. The complexity of Amazon's...
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...Amazon.com Evolution Business Information Systems/219 October 25, 2010 Amazon.com Evolution With an untold amount of online retailers fighting for a piece of the consumer dollar, only one has risen to the top to become the world’s largest online retailer. With a diverse set of services to support its online retailing, Amazon is in direct competition with two of the largest Internet and software companies, but by using its vast informational resources Amazon has continued its success in internet based business. Many analysts and consumers wonder if Amazon.com is moving away from its core competency of being an online retailer. When you first look at Amazon.com starting from a book seller and trying to become a service provider your initial answer would be yes however, according to Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com his vision of the company was to create a place you could buy anything and everything. Bezos decided to start selling books because of the low cost, and he did it online because a computer allows you to sort, search and organize a wide selection. Between 1998 and 1999, Amazon.com went from books to music, DVDs/video, toys, electronics, home improvement, software, and games. As sales rise they continue to adventure out to a broader spectrum to bring more to their consumers. Amazon.com always focused on selling products to others and now was ready to launch other services. For instance auctions, search engines, simple storage...
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...Amazon Evolution Amazon is an online retailer that users can find on the World Wide Web. Amazon will mainly target online shopper, by having low prices and a variety of different services. As time has passed Amazon has had to change its business model to target different consumers as times have changed. I don’t believe that Amazon is moving away from its core competence of being the leading online retailer because it is expanding and offering other services. Amazon not only sell’s books online they offered a variety of services. The services that Amazon has newly added to their business model are that they have decided to build infrastructures that will online storage. The company was only using 10 percent of its processing capacity so the Amazon decided to venture out to businesses and offer them the same infrastructures that they were using. These infrastructures will consist of three different types of services which will include Simple Storage Service (S3), The Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), and the Mechanical Turk. The Elastic Compute Cloud or EC2 allows companies to save data on Amazons server. Amazon offers this service to businesses to store data and applications of Amazons disk drive for only 15 cents per gigabyte. EC2 is another service that Amazon will offer to customers where they will rent out processing power that would start at 10 cents an hour which can be equivalent to one basic server. The Mechanical Turk is a service that combines processing power and networks...
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...Amazon Evolution Amazon is a Fortune 500 company and is the global leader in e-commerce. They have expanded significantly their product offerings, international sites, worldwide network of fulfillment and customer service centers. Amazon offers everything from books and electronics to tennis rackets and diamond jewelry. Technological innovation has driven the growth of Amazon, offering customers more types of products, the luxury of convenience, and even lower prices. Big-name retailers work with Amazon Services to power their e-commerce offerings from end-to-end, including technology services, merchandising, customer service, and order fulfillment. Other branded merchants also leverage Amazon as an incremental sales channel for their new merchandise; enabling to find products from top retailers across the Amazon site. Amazon has come along way from its humble beginning; their evolving with a mission to create new technologies, expand into more geographies and continue to improve the lives of shoppers and sellers around the world. With evolution within a company comes change; these changes generally stem from the company’s core platform, competition, and business in general. Amazon has been very successful in all of their accomplishments; with all of these accomplishments Amazon is trying to evolve. Amazon is expanding the possibilities in a variety of businesses ventures; Amazon is venturing toward a more a web-based search engine and service provider instead...
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