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Amazon Supply Chain Analysis

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Analysis of Amazon’s supply chain investment strategy

When speaking about the largest retailers in the United States, one will always mention the two largest retail distributors, Walmart and Amazon. While the former company depends on its brick and mortar stores as the major contributor or their revenues, the latter focuses most of its attention on internet-based retailing. Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994 due to his belief that he would regret not participating sooner in the internet business boom during the 1990’s. Bezos read a report about the future of internet which projected annual web commerce growth to be at 2,300%. At the beginning, the company was pioneered as an online bookstore due to the low price point of books and the huge number of titles available. The advantage Amazon had compared to other brick and mortar store was that an online bookstore could carry several more times the titles than a physical store, since there is an unlimited virtual warehouse. By 2000, the company had moved away from simply selling books, while expanding into an online marketing place selling many varieties of goods and services. Due to Amazon’s early entry into the online retail market, it had the first mover advantage to allow the company to “get big fast” and become one of the the most recognizable names on the internet. By the end of 2002, Amazon had 22.3 million registered users on the website which makes it one of the largest online retailing company at that time. However, many logistics and operations problems come with such quick expansion and such issues still hover over the company today. In this paper, we will have a look at how Amazon reacts to these issues through the early 21st century and see if the method of operations and investments for the company is sustainable. Amazon has always been a company famous for its huge selection of product,

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