2. FROM GARAGE SALES TO
THE WORD’S BIGGEST
ONLINE RETAILER; THE
STORY OF AMAZON.COM
In 1994 after reading a report
about the future of internet
which projected a Web
commerce growth of 2,300%,
Jeff Bezos left his job on Wall
Street, moved to Washington
State and began an online book
selling business out of his
garage.
3. AMAZON.COM WAS NAMED
AFTER THE AMAZON RIVER
Bezos wanted his
company to begin with A
to be alphabetically first
and chose Amazon,
because he thought it
sounded “exotic and
different” like his
company, and because,
like the largest river in the
world, Bezos wanted his
business to become the
largest online store in the
world.
4. FROM BOOKS TO
EVERYTHING FROM A TO Z
Within two short months,
Amazon.com sales grew to
$20,000 a week, selling to 50
U.S. States and 45 countries
from his “virtual” warehouse.
Bezos moved his operation to
Seattle and added more
products including music discs,
computer software and
hardware and videos.
The arrow in the logo pointing
from a to z represents you can
buy anything online through
amazon.com.
5. 183 MILLION PRODUCTS AVAILABLE ON AMAZON.COM
Mission Statement:”To be
the Earth’s Most
Customer-centric
company where people
can find and discover
anything they want to buy
online”
1. 80 million people visit
the site monthly
2. 97,000 full and part
time employees
3. Went public in 1997,
traded on NASDAQ
Below is a complete list
of the products you
CAN’T buy on
amazon.com.....
6. JEFF BEZOS NAMED TIME MAGAZINE’S PERSON OF THE YEAR IN 1999
Jeff Bezos was named
Time Magazine’s Person of
the Year for his influence
on how people buy on line.
Time said, “There are a
million internet companies
out there. It’s a jungle and
he’s the king.”
Amazon has more than 2
million 3d party sellers
offering millions of new and
refurbished items from
books and electronics to
Toys, Home & Garden,
Fashion, Sports and even
Food with websites in
countries around the world.
7. Amazon.com is currently the ruling and undoubted
champ in both the internet retailing and across the
whole department in overall customer satisfaction
according to the latest results from American Customer
Satisfaction Index. Amazon truly believes in caring and
serving the customer across all departments. Amazon
strongly believes in a high standard of customer service
before and after a purchase.
8. It’s extremely easy to place an order on
Amazon.com, sign in to your account, search for
your items, place your order, make your payment
and submit.
Amazon has a self service page which allows you
to track and administer all your purchases and
your account. You can check your order, make
changes to your order, there’s also a help
department with just a click of a button you can
get answers to any question you may have.
9. Amazon ships to any address around the world and they
have a good 30 days return policy, no hassle providing
it’s returned to the seller and in the same condition it
was received.
10. Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos has 7 customer service lessons for
his employees:
Don’t Just Listen to Your Customers, Understand Them –
the whole reasoning is that everyone regardless of their
position should be able to work in a call center and
that’s why all managers including the CEO attends a two
days of call-center training.
Serve the Needs of the Customer – their goals are to
serve the customers and be preoccupied with the
customers not the competitors.
The Empty Chair: The Most Important Person in the
Room – make the customer the main focus which will
make the company more flexible. The customer should
always be the number one focus.
11. Never Settle for 99% - always aim for 100%, don’t be
satisfied until it’s 100%.
Respect Today’s Customer – when you make customers
unhappy, they’ll tell a few friends in the real world, however in
the internet world they’ll tell thousands of friends.
Strive to Create a Customer-Centric Company – working
together that our interests are associated with our
customers; long term things will fare well for customers and
will certainly work extremely well for Amazon.
Don’t Be Afraid to Apologize – the goal is to apologize to the
customer when there is a problem and resolve the
customers’ issue and not to make the same mistake going
forward.
12. Products and Services
Amazon.com originally started as an online bookstore and quickly
branched out to selling all sorts of products from DVDs, VHSs, music
CDs, video and MP3 download/streaming. You can now purchase
several hundreds of products from Amazon such as electronics, video
games, clothes, furniture, groceries, jewelry, baby products, beauty
products and toys just to name a few. Amazon also manufactures
consumer electronics such as Amazon Kindle e-book reader and the
Kindle Fire tablet computer and is a key supplier of cloud computing
services. Amazon has different retail websites for several countries
across the world and international shipping to other countries for some
products.
13. Amazon also has a web service that offers a wide range of
international compute, storage, database, and various other
web base services that assist companies to transport faster,
incur lower IT expenses and level applications. These services
are used and trusted by some of the biggest companies and
newest start-ups to control a large selection of workloads which
includes: web and mobile applications, data processing and
warehousing, storage, files and many others.
14. Some Really Cool Facts About Amazon.com Products and Services
1. You can send birthday cards which are actually gift cards to
someone by email for either a store like Starbucks, Subway or
Whole Foods or load the card (ecard) with any amount from 15
cents to thousands of dollars of “Amazon” bucks (or value) so
the recipient use the money toward purchases at amazon.com
or amazon.ca. You can print at home or send a gift box with an
enclosed gift card for $50 and up, with free one day shipping.
These make perfect gifts for birthdays, anniversaries, that hard
to buy for wedding couple, Christmas and just a really great way
to say thank you to someone special.
Amazon.com Gift Cards - Print at Home
15. 2. Amazon has sites world wide including the two most popular ones
amazon.com (U.S.) and amazon.ca (Canadian)
-Amazon offers free shipping on qualified items over $25
3. Amazon offers Deals of the Day on trending items like bicycle
speedometers, collapsible bikes, Turbo tax kits, even motorcycles. They add
fresh seasonable content to get people to buy what they want in season.
4. Amazon is often the first to introduce new products (no lineups in the
store) or they will put your name on a wait list for product launches.
5. Fresh content and items are listed under their last 30 days heading for
those who want to see “the latest trends” in retailing and merchandise.
6. Amazon proudly features name brands like Microsoft, Starbucks, Whole
Foods Subway and sells gift cards online for these popular brands.
7. you can even sell stuff on Amazon! An individual or a company can sell
certain merchandise now on Amazon.com. For instance as an individual you
can sell up to 40 items for a fee payable to Amazon.
16. Sell on Amazon and
reach hundreds of
millions of Amazon
customers.
Businesses of all sizes
can list products on
Amazon,
one of the fastest ways
to start selling online.
17. Upload your listings
Add your offers to the Amazon catalog using feeds, spreadsheets, and
other tools.
Customers can see your products on Amazon.com
With features like 1-Click and a brand millions trust, Amazon helps
customers, make quick, easy, worry-free purchases.
Ship products to customers
Amazon notifies you when customers place an order. Use Fulfillment by
Amazon and let Amazon do the shipping for you — or handle shipping yourself.
Amazon transfers payments to you
Amazon deposits payment into your bank account at regular intervals and
notifies you that your payment has been sent.
18. 8. Amazon has introduced Amazon Prime with streaming,
downloads, movie watching etc. to complete with some other
brands like Netflix, etc.
• FREE Two-Day Shipping on millions of items
• No minimum order size
• Unlimited instant streaming of thousands of movies and TV
shows with Prime Instant Video
• Read free books each month through Kindle First and the
Kindle Owners' Lending Library
After your free trial, Amazon Prime is just $99/year. You can
cancel anytime.
19. 9. Amazon has “wish lists” and gift registry!
Gifts & Lists: Wish List, Gift Cards Store, Gift Ideas,
Wedding Registry, Baby Registry, Your Media Library
10. Amazon is an environmentally conscious
company who offer a “rage-free packaging”
consideration and try to limit plastic and other not so
friendly to the environment materials. Considering
their volume of sales –this is a good thing and a
great message as a good corporate citizen.
20. AMAZON BOOMS IN 2013
WITH $74.45 BILLION IN
REVENUE
Amazon reported $44.52
billion of sales revenue for
2013 in the North American
Segment, 28% higher than the
previous year
International revenue grew to
$29.94 billion, 14% higher
than the previous year. 1
21. AMAZON’S REVENUE
SOARS
BEYOND EXPECTATIONS
Amazon had predicted that
revenue in the fourth quarter
of 2013 would increase by 12
to 24 percent. The results
came in at the very top of
that range. As for the loss, it
was smaller than the 60
cents a share, or $274
million, the company lost on
2012. Much of the poor 2012
showing was related to an ill-
fated investment in
LivingSocial, a daily deals
site. 2
22. 2013 EARNING PER
SHARE
Amazon reported
annual earnings
equaled $0.51 per
share, which beats
Wall Street
estimates by
$0.18 EPS. 4
23. 2014 SALES FORECAST
For the first quarter of
2014 Amazon is
expecting a net sales
between $18.2-19.9
billion, a 13% to 24%
growth over Q1 2013.
Operating income is
expected to be negative
or positive up to $200
million each way. Their
operating income in Q1
2013 was $181 million.
3
24. AMAZON AND
SOCIAL MEDIA
Amazon is a pioneer in
e-commerce electronic
books, reading devices
and cloud computing.
But it has lagged in
social networking and
social media.
25. Amazon is stepping up social
media efforts after the largest
Internet retailer partially
missed one of the hottest
technology trends of recent
years.
26. Currently amazon shoppers
have the capability to
voluntarily connect their
Amazon accounts to their
Facebook accounts, but until
now that capability has
largely been used by
consumers to broadcast their
Amazon purchases or
products they want to buy to
their connections on
Facebook.
28. AMAZON ON TWITTER
Amazon’s latest addition to the
company's affiliate program is a
new feature called "Share with
Twitter," participants can
generate "tweetable" links to
any Amazon product after first
logging into their associates
account, by clicking on the
"Share with Twitter" button from
any Amazon product details
page.
30. AMAZON AND SOCIAL MEDIA
Social media strategically extends businesses by incorporating tools to
improve customer service and the overall customer experience in many
valuable ways Amazon does not usually miss the mark on new
technological trends as they have been trailblazers in one-click shopping
and e-reading. While Amazon’s own .com presence is exceptional; it
lacks in social media (Sareen) This is mostly due to the change in the e-
commerce field While every site has a “tell-a-friend”, “add to list” and
“write a review” button, most sites now need to be integrated with social
media tools that can enhance interaction with other tools, apps and
communities (Durst) People don’t just want to interact with products by
“liking” them; they want to like, follow and friend brands and people and
create relationships (Durst) Amazon has still proven to be platform
focused and it has ignored the innovations in e-commerce that could
potentially improve their business Amazon doesn’t use social media to
handle, forward, respond to or manage customer service issues They
use it for mere self promotion and to boost sales which is proving to be
counteractive.
31. AMAZON AS ITS OWN SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM
Amazon has many social media aspects integrated
into the site as its own platform 2010- 6 million
individual product reviews on Amazon website
(Sareen) They have a customer review section
Customers can see what other customers’ opinions
are on products Shows similar products others have
bought when you buy a product they have bought
Hard to find what friends have bought Hard to
connect with other people on Amazon other than
through customer reviews These have preceded
things like the “like” button on face book These
sections can be exploited due to lack of screening
These sections have previously helped Amazon
become one of the largest internet retailers Amazon
has recently added Twitter and Facebook to their
Kindle reader books (Sareen) Can also send public
notes to Kindle readers regarding books and it is also
integrated with social media (Sareen)
32. HAS AMAZON MISSED THE CONCEPT OF SOCIAL
MEDIA?
Twitter (Durst) Broadcasts are driven and self-
promotional They give no response to replies or
appeals for assistance Few re-tweets or responses
Only responses are to “positive” tweets and/or
usually to “celebrities” Amazon has 14 accounts
relating to games, deals and music- most of them
display a lack of interest in what they are promoting
and tweeting about and have little activity Amazon
Wish List however has helped hundreds of people
with service related inquiries The twitter account,
like all others, is mostly to drive sales and for
promotional reasons Amazon never actually
addresses “points of need”- individual mentions and
comments that actually respond to customer’s
needs.
33.
34. Facebook (Durst) Amazon’s “official” Facebook pages
are not listed as official, making them hard to find
Amazon’s main fan page has 240,000 fans The Amazon
fan page wall only shows posts from Amazon, not
comments/complaints from customers Only
promotional messages are able to get responses and
even those comments are ignored by Amazon. Amazon
doesn’t use social media to handle, forward, respond to
or manage customer service issues They use it for mere
self promotion and to boost sales which is proving to be
counteractive Social media strategically extends
businesses by incorporating tools to improve customer
service and the overall customer experience in many
valuable ways Amazon has still proven to be platform
focused and it has ignored the innovations in e-
commerce that could potentially improve their business
People who do not get responses via social media from
Amazon could potentially engage with other angry users
They could collect research and compare notes
regarding Amazon’s lack of customer service via social
media which could reflect very negatively on the
business
35.
36.
37. AMAZON’S LACK OF SOCIAL MEDIA USE COULD BE
INTENTIONAL?
(Sareen) 200 million users on Amazon everyday-
integrating with social media could expose purchasing
habits and purchasing intentions of users; something
that vendors pay millions to access through Amazon
advertisements (Sareen) Social media aspects such as
Facebook Marketplace allow fewer opportunities to
capture customer purchasing data (Sareen) This would
counteract Amazon’s primary goal Simple and efficient
online shopping could be compromised; integrated
social media could compromise Amazon’s productivity
and “one-click shopping” (Sareen)
38.
39. Conclusion
In conclusion, based on our research, although Amazon.com itself is a form
of social media, however we think if they were to use social media in a
more intelligent way like a company such as Wal-Mart, they could certainly
skyrocket their sales and popularity of their company, especially with the
younger demographic of people.
Amazon.com is a user-friendly site, however they could do more in terms
of content and copy by showcasing what they do as a company and how
their users could get involved with causes such as the Haiti relief fund. It is
on their website but really hidden. It would make them look like a good
corporate citizen as well as a trusted platform to coordinate a large scale
fundraising campaign. Certainly they have almost everything on the planet
to buy which is why you would go to the site. Customer reviews and more
content on the products would be helpful in term of high end merchandise
like cameras. We really like that they have become more involved with
writers in terms of showcasing books directly through Amazon.com and
they have a new writer’s award. They obviously want to make an impact
with the reading public. Again this move helps to build their public
relations efforts by building their corporate image as being a caring,
involved company who cares about what their users care about.
40. REFERENCES:-
1. Amazon.com, Inc. (2014, Jan30), Management Discusses Q4 2013 Results. Retrieved from
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-coms-management-discusses-q4-
002504787.html;_ylt=A0LEV2V3_BxTfW8AI1XrFAx.;_ylu=X3oDMTBybnV2cXQwBHNlYwNzcgRwb3MDMgRjb2xv
A2JmMQR2dGlkAw--
2. Streitfeld, D. (2013, Oct 24), Amazon’s Revenue Soars, but No Profit Is in Sight, The New York Times. Retrieved
from http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/25/technology/amazons-revenue-soars-but-no-profit-in-sight.html
3. Swanner, N. (2014, Jan 30), Amazon finishes strong, ends 2013 with total net income of $274 million. Retrieved
from http://androidcommunity.com/amazon-finishes-strong-ends-2013-with-total-net-income-of-274-million-
20140130/
4. Amazon.com Inc. Bloomberg Business Week. Retrieved from
http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/earnings/earnings.asp?ticker=AMZN
5. Salesforce.com, (2013, June10), Jeff Bezos lessons, by Kevin Baldacci, Retrieved from
http://blogs.salesforce.com/company/2013/06/jeff-bezos-lessons.html
6. Amazon.ca, Customer Service Help, Retrieved from
http://www.amazon.ca/gp/help/customer/display.html?ie=UTF8&nodeId=1056238
7. Amazon.ca, Marketplace Returns & Refunds, Retrieved from
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March 28, 2014, from http://socialmediatoday.com/himanshu-sareen/1715836/why-amazon-most-social-least-
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Understand Social Commerce : MarketingProfs Article. Retrieved March 28, 2014, from
http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2010/4049/why-amazon-doesnt-understand-social-commerce
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