1. Executive summary
Since technologies become more and more advance as time goes by, the business world is trying to make use of it. Thus, nowadays, in electronic commerce, which is a combination of business and advanced technology, is becoming more and more well-known. In order to deeply understand about the electronic commerce, our group has chosen a website, which is Amazon.com to be studied further.
2. Introduction of Amazon.com
Amazon.com is an American electronic commerce (e-commerce) company based in Seattle, Washington. It was founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994, and was published to the World Wide Web in 1995. It first started as an on-line bookstore, but now it has diversified to product lines of VHS, DVD, music CDs, MP3 format, computer software, video games, electronics, apparel, furniture, etc. Amazon was one of the first major companies to sell goods by Internet. Amazon is not just selling to people inside America. It also provides global shipping to certain countries for some of its products. Amazon is generally a business to consumer (B2C) website, but it can also be classified as consumer to consumer (C2C) website as people can sell things through Amazon.
Amazon.com first started as a company named cadabra.com. But because it sounds like ‘cadaver’, meaning ‘dead body’, the founder, Jeff Bezos renamed the company to "Amazon" after the world's biggest river. At first, the company’s business plan was not to expect profit for four to five years. This plan provoked the stockholders complaints that the company would not reach profitability. But when many e-companies emerged at that time, Amazon persevered and made its first profit in 2001.
3. Purpose
The purpose of Amazon.com is to allow people buy and sell goods through the internet. By accessing the website at home to do a transaction, it saves more time and costs rather than travelling to a physical store to purchase goods. As it is also part of a C2C website, it links people throughout the world to do the transaction by just clicking on computer.
4. Features
4.1 Shopping cart
In order to provide an efficiency services, Amazon.com provides shopping cart software to its customers. Shopping cart makes people a lot convenient when purchasing more than just one good. With shopping cart, people just click the goods that they want and put it in the shopping cart rather than click one good, purchase it, go back to the site and do the same thing again.
4.2 Payment method
Amazon.com offers many kinds of payment methods to its customers; however they are not accepting international wire transfers, PayPal, or Smart Cards. Payment method can be made in many ways such as:
- Credit card & check card
- Pay Directly from Your Checking Account
This method is done without having to mail in a physical cheque but this requires customers to have an US branch bank checking account in order to make a payment.
- Amazon Gift card
This can be purchased from Amazon.com for any amount between of US$5.00 to US$5,000.00. When making payment, customer just need to print out the gift cards from home and send them by e-mail or snail mail anywhere in the world.
- Bill Me Later®
Bill Me Later® is a kind of method that allows people to buy now and pay later. This is a quick, easy and secure way to pay the orders without using your credit card. The step is simply just entering customers’ birthday, the last 4 digits of customers’ Social Security Number, and then accepting the terms.
- Amazon Store card
The Amazon.com Store Card is a consumer credit card for use in purchasing items from Amazon.com. This is only for US residents who are 18 years old and above.
5. Strength & Weaknesses
5.1 Strength
- Amazon.com is a huge global brand. It is recognizable for two main reasons. It was one of the original dotcoms, and over the last decade it has developed a customer base of around 30 million people. It was an early exploiter of online technologies for e-commerce, which made it one of the first online retailers. It has built on its early successes with books.
- Product diversification from books and CD/DVD markets has provided additional customers in other product areas and indicates strategic movement to grow the business through new customer bases.
5.2 Weaknesses
- Amazon.com is a virtual storefront and has no physical store. Thus, customers can only see the products through the pictures that provided in the website. This may lead to dissatisfaction for some customers since the real products’ appearance may look different from the picture.
- Layout of Amazon.com website may too wordy for some people. This may not attract those people who can get confuse to explore the site.
- As this business can only deal from electronic device which is computer, and also require an internet service, this may not attract those people that are willing to buy but do not have ability to operate a computer as well.
6. Special highlights
- WebStore
Amazon.com will be soon introducing its new software, which is WebStore. This allows businesses to create e-commerce websites using Amazon.com technology. Merchants can customize their websites using their own photos and branding. Sellers pay a commission of 7%, which includes credit-card processing fees and fraud protection, and a subscription fee of US$59.95/month for an unlimited number of WebStore and listings
- Amazon.com has been introducing their ‘Amazon MP3’ service to their subsidiary websites worldwide throughout the year in January 2008.
7. Conclusion
The use of e-commerce as seen here with Amazon.com is an example of how information systems have changed from “brick & mortar” to “spatial”. Instead of having to spend time and money on transportation costs to travel to faraway places to do shopping, it can be done at home on a computer. The setback is however, some people lack the appropriate knowledge on computer and the internet. As Amazon.com is an American based company, it uses American English to communicate to its customers. Some people from other parts of the world may misunderstand the words used in the website. Moreover, the payment methods used in the transactions may not be convenient to people outside the United States, who are subjected to currency fluctuations and to people who don’t have a credit card.
Reference:
http://www.amazon.com/
