The Truth About Amazon.com

1.History and business model:

Amazon was founded in 1994, stimulated by Bezos calls his framework of minimization of regret, their efforts to push back the end of life despite a claim by not betting on the Internet gold rush.1 Lore often that Bezos wrote its business plan while he and his wife has a 1988 Chevrolet Blazer from Fort Worth, Texas, in Bellevue, Washington, even though this story is largely apocryphal according to employees in the early company.original research?

The company began operating as an online bookstore under the name (as in Abracadabra Cadabra.com), a name that Bezos quickly abandoned due to their sound as "corpse." Although most large bookstores brick and mortar and catalog orders by mail for books can offer 200,000 titles, an online bookstore could offer many more. Bezos renamed his company "Amazon" after that the world's largest river.

The company was incorporated in 1994 in Washington, began operations in July 1995 and reincorporated in Delaware in 1996. The first book Amazon.com sold was Douglas Hofstadter Concepts & Creative Analogies fluids: computer models of the fundamental mechanisms of Thought.Amazon.com had its initial public offering May 15, 1997, trading on the NASDAQ Stock Exchange under the symbol of the Amazon for an introductory price of $ 18.00 per share (equivalent U.S. $ 1.50 after three capital increases during late 1990).

initial business plan was unusual Amazon: the company does not expect to achieve benefit from four to five years. In retrospect, the strategy has been effective. Amazon has grown at a rapid pace in the 1990s when many other companies Internet grew at an incredibly rapid pace.

Amazon "slow" growth caused a number of its stockholders to complain, saying that the company There has been no return fairly quickly. When the bubble burst of the dot-com and many e-companies went bankrupt, Amazon persevered and finally turned its first profit in the fourth quarter of 2002: a meager U.S. $ 5 million, just 1 ¢ per share, on revenue of U.S. $ more than 1 billion, but it is important symbolically.

The company has since remained profitable: the profit Net income was $ 35.3 million in 2003, $ 588.5 U.S. $ in 2004, 359 million in 2005 and U.S. $ 190,000,000 in 2006 (including a U.S. $ 662,000,000 of R & D in 2006). However, the benefit combined company remain negative. In September 2007, the accumulated deficit totaled 1.58 billion.

Revenues continued to grow through to product diversification and international presence: $ 3.9 billion in 2002, U.S. $ 5,300,000,000 in 2003 $ U.S. 6.9 billion in 2004, 8500 U.S. $ million in 2005 and 10.7 million in 2006. On November 21, 2005, Amazon entered the S & P 500, replacing AT & T after its merger with SBC Communications.

Time Magazine named Bezos Person of the Year 1999 in recognition of the company's success in popularizing online shopping

Operator Associations
Web sites of Borders (borders.com, borders.co.uk), Waldenbooks (waldenbooks.com), Virgin Megastores (virginmega.com), CDNOW (cdnow.com) and HMV (Hmv.com) are powered and hosted by Amazon. Until June 30, 2006, typing ToysRUs.com into a browser even increase Amazon.com 's Toys & Games tab, but this relationship has been terminated following a lawsuit.4 aa.

Amazon.com powers and operates retail web sites for less than the goal, the NBA, Sears Canada, Sears United Kingdom, the benefit Cosmetics, Bebe Stores Timex Corporation, Marks & Spencer, Mothercare, Lacoste and Bombay Company, now defunct. For a growing number of customers of the company, now among traders in the United Kingdom, Marks & Spencer and Mothercare, Amazon provides a unified multichannel platform from which a customer can either interact with the site of sale terminals in stores and independent operators in telephone service to customers.

It also powers AOL Shop @ AOL service via Web Services technology.

The company's world headquarters is located in Seattle, Beacon Hill in Washington. It has offices in other parts of Greater Seattle, including Union Station and downtown Columbia.

2.The product lines:

Amazon has steadily poured into the retail disc music CDs, videos and DVDs, software, consumer electronics, kitchenware, tools, lawn and garden items, toys and games baby products, clothing, sporting goods, gourmet foods, jewelry, watches, health and personal care, beauty, musical instruments, industrial supplies and scientists, food and more.

The auction Amazon.com company launched its own auction site in service in March 1999. However, it erodes the steamroller of growth of industry pioneer eBay. Amazon Sales auction was followed by the launch of a company called fixed-price contract in September 1999 Auctions, and association is not Sotheby's / Amazon sothebys.amazon.com called in November. Auctions Although not up to their expectations, which laid the foundation for successful service Amazon launched in 2001 Market, which allows customers to sell used books, CDs, DVDs and other products alongside new items. Amazon Marketplace's main rival today is service eBay's Half.com.

Top August 5th, 2005, Amazon began selling products under their own label, "Pinzon" initial applications of the mark has been suggested the company intends to focus on textiles, kitchen utensils and other household items goods.In March 2007, the company applied to develop the brand for cover a broad and diversified list of property and record a new design made PINZON of the word "in stylized letters with a notched letter O whose space appears in part "a" position ". 6. The list of products approved for the coverage of the brand has expanded to include items such as paints, carpets, wallpaper, hair accessories, clothing, footwear, headgear, cleaning products, and jewelry.

On May 16, 2007 Amazon announced its intention to launch its own online music store launched in public beta store.The September 25, 2007, selling downloads exclusively in MP3 format without digital rights management.

August 2007, Amazon announced Amazon Fresh, a grocery service offering perishable and nonperishable. Customers can receive orders or have them delivered at home. Delivery is initially restricted to residents of Mercer Island, Washington, a wealthy suburb of Seattle.

3.Website:

A feature Amazon's popular is the ability for users to submit their comments to the website of each product. As part of its review, users must rate the product a rating scale of one to five stars. These rating scales provide a basic idea of the popularity and reliability of a product.

The function control is an important and strong influence over customers and one of the main reasons for the success of amazon.com books for sale. As with reviews books anywhere, the buyer must beware that all reviewers have bias. In normal circumstances, the reader comments at least once a modest assessment of a particular book.

Because it is an open forum, the player may receive a variety of perspectives. However, the anonymity of web reviewers increases the chances abuse as self-praise, praise from friends, or malicious criticism. This was confirmed in 2004 when the original comments were made public by accident in a site Amazon, and some authors openly confirmed their positive reviews of their own books.

Amazon offers an additional option for Badging commentators, for example, indicate the name of "reality" of the browser (based on a credit card) or to indicate that the reviewer is one of the "top" (more popular) reviewers. Some books have more than one thousand reviews (eg Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged), but many books, especially the newer ones do not.

The U.S. site generally been more critical sites, but other countries offer the possibility of other reviewers. A notice posted on a site is not necessarily visible on another site.

Look inside the book is a feature that allows customers to search for keywords in the text of many books in the public catalog.The started 120,000 titles (33 million pages of text) on October 23, 2003. There are currently about 250,000 books in the program. Amazon has cooperated with 130 publishers that users can perform these searches.

To avoid copyright violations, Amazon.com does not return the computer-readable text of the book, but rather an image of the relevant page, disables printing, and imposes limits on the number of pages in a book only one user can access. Amazon plans to launch Search Inside the Book internationally. In addition, customers can buy access to book online via the Amazon Upgrade program, although selection of law books to this service is currently limited.

According to information in Amazon.com discussion forums, Amazon gets about 40% of sales affiliates, whom they call "Associates." A franchisee is an independent seller or business that receives a commission for referring customers to Amazon.com.

Partners To do this, place links on their websites to the Amazon homepage or to specific products. If a reference resulted in the sale, the shareholder receives a Committee of the Amazons. Worldwide, Amazon has "over 900,000 members" in its affiliate programs. Shareholders can access the Amazon catalog directly their Web sites with Amazon Web Services (AWS) XML service.

Amazon has been one of the first online companies to establish an affiliate marketing program.AStore is a new product that allows Associates to join a subset of integrated products on Amazon or links from another site.

According to the website audience measurement Compete.com, Amazon attracts approximately 50 million U.S. consumers to its Web site on a monthly basis.

4.Noteworthy events:

In 2002, Amazon became the exclusive distributor for the well-publicized Segway Human Transporter. Bezos was an early supporter of the Segway before its details were made public.

On June 21, 2003, Amazon coordinated what was at that time one of the largest sales and distribution events in e-commerce history with the sale of over 1.3 million copies of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and beaten by Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows with a sale of more than 2 million of pre-ordered copies in 2007.

On July 16, September 2005, Amazon celebrated its 10th anniversary with a concert broadcast around the world live with host Bill Maher and artists such as Bob Dylan and Norah Jones.

5.Donations:

In 2001, Amazon has been one of the first online stores to begin accepting donations Red Cross on behalf of 9 / 11 victims. For several days, the company has dedicated its home page that any necessary cause.citation

In 2004, Amazon launched its Presidential Candidates feature, whereby customers can donate $ 5 and the U.S. $ 200 for presidential campaigns U.S. hope, the resurrection of the Amazon Honor System to this effect. The honor system was launched in 2001 as a means Amazon customers to "tip" their "Favorite Web sites and buy digital content on the Web," Amazon collecting 2.9% of the payment plus a lump sum of U.S. $ 0.30. It has never been arrested, but had fallen into disuse.

In late 2004, with the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami in the Indian Ocean, Amazon set up a channel online donation to the American Red Cross Honor System, waiving its processing fee. As of January 3, 2005, more than 162,000 people had donated more than $ 13.1 million in this way.

In the same week, Amazon created similar channels for organizations to British, Canadian, French, German and Japanese Red Cross through its international sites. Over 7,000 Britons donated more than U.S. $ 350,000, 900 Canadians over U.S. $ 56,000, $ 23,000 in 660 French, over 2900 U.S. German $ 145,000, Japanese and U.S. $ 1,900 more than 66,000.

Amazon has relaunched its channel Don Red Cross after Hurricane Katrina in late August 2005. On September 8, over 98,000 payments were made totaling more than 10.7 million.

use 6.Patent:

The company has been controversial for its alleged use of patents as a competitive challenge. The patent "one-click" is perhaps The best known example of this. use one-click Amazon patent against competitor Barnes and Noble site has led to the Free Software Foundation to announce a boycott of Amazon in December 1999.The boycott was suspended in September 2002.

On May 12, 2006, the USPTO ordered a review of the "One-Click 'patent on the basis of a petition filed by Peter Calveley. Calveley cited as prior art e-commerce patents Digicash previous system of electronic money.

On February 22, 2000, the company was granted a patent for a system of reference of an Internet-based client, or what is commonly called a program Affiliate. "The reaction was swift and negative. Industry leaders Tim O'Reilly and Charlie Jackson spoke out strongly against this patent and O'Reilly published an open letter to Bezos protesting against one-click patent and the patent affiliate program and make a request to "prevent any attempt to limit development Internet commerce.

O'Reilly collected 10,000 signatures for the petition. Bezos responded with his own open letter. The protest ended with O'Reilly and Bezos Visit to Washington DC to lobby for patent reform.

On February 25, 2003, the company obtained a patent entitled "Method and system for achieving a debate on a topic in Internet discussion forums.

Benoit 7.Chris DVD:

At the end of June 2007, shortly after the death of wrestler Chris Benoit, Amazon sent a special note in the pages of search results on the term "WWE" WWE News tragedy. Wrestler Chris Benoit and his wife and son were found dead at his home in Georgia, and police are investigating the situation as a possible murder-suicide. "

Legend was followed by a photo and a link to buy the blows: The Story of Chris Benoit DVD. Amazon.com later removed the message, after numerous complaints from the community of professional wrestling

8.The Humane Society of the United Kingdom C. Amazon.com States, Inc.:

Amazon continues to carry two cockfighting magazines and two dog fighting videos although Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) contends that the sale of these materials is a violation of federal law. The Humane Society of the United States introduced a complaint against Amazon. The HSUS actively advising supporters to write Amazon seeking removal of offensive materials.

This campaign accelerated writing in August 2007 after the dog fighting highly publicized case of NFL quarterback Michael Vick.Some supporters are also calling for a boycott of Amazon to Content animal fighting are removed from sale.

About the Author

Henry Allen,is an prominent ebook promoter,that specialize in helping people find
the best cost affective way to shop online.You can also find the best ebooks in the…

Henry Allen,is an prominent ebook promoter,that specialize in helping people find the best cost affective way to shop online.Please feel free to compare and comment at http://squidoo.com/thebestofamazon

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