An E-Commerce Success: Amazon.com

With the advancement of information technology, the use of e-commerce has improved tremendously in the past few years and has in fact become very popular nowadays. Many businesses have successfully gained an awesome profit by selling their products online. The examples of these businesses are Amazon.com, Ebay.com, Lelong.com, Dell, and so on.
Among those examples, the company I want to highlight here is Amazon.com. Amazon.com was founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994, and launched in 1995. It is a pure dot-com company whereby they only operate their business through the internet. Amazon.com started out with selling books online and then quickly diversified by adding other items. It has become the first best known online retailer in the internet world.

Causes of Success

• Customer Orientation

Amazon.com is a customer oriented based company. The customer-centricity has been part of its mission since the day of its operation. They start with the customer and work backwards in considering matters such as whether the boxes are easy to open, what packaging material they use, how much packing material is in the box, and etc. Due to the efficiency in dealing with the customer and continuous focus on their needs, Amazon.com has successfully become the top among other entire online retailers.

• Continuous Innovation

As we know, if a company does not listen to their customers, they will fail. But if the company only listens to their customers, they will also fail. The ideas to investigate might come from customers who are a really important source of information. However, it is also important for the company to innovate and create something new or improved through research and development. Amazon.com runs a lot of test in its usability lab almost continuously. The project teams of the company can request usability testing, and the usability team also goes out and tests stuff of interest for the purpose of coming out with new products.

• Customer Loyalty Enhancing

Amazon.com maintains its customer loyalty by providing user friendly interface with convenience and easy to use features. For example, easy to search, useful information related to product, customize options, e-mail confirmation, and also convenient and reliable payment system to their customers. In addition, Amazon.com also provides guarantees and adopts return policy.

• Variety of Products

In the beginning, Amazon.com did not sell other things but books online. Due to the changing environment and meeting with the customer needs, it started to offer a variety of products which are suitable for different groups of people. The range of products includes videos, music, cell phones, hardware, software, video games, electronics, health care products, clothing, furniture, toys and even food items.