Phoenix Trading Artists

Sunday, January 14th, 2007 at 8:13 pm

The Truth About Amazon.com

1.History and business model:

Amazon was founded in 1994, driven by what Bezos refers to as a framework to reduce Although the minimum, his effort to fend off late in life despite not stake a claim in the Internet gold rush.1 is common tradition that Bezos wrote its business plan while he and his wife drove a 1988 Chevrolet Blazer Fort Worth, Texas, in Bellevue, Washington, although this story is largely apocryphal according employees to research principles company.original?

The company began operating as an online bookstore under the name Cadabra.com (as in abracadabra), a name that Bezos quickly abandoned due to their sound as "corpse". While the largest brick and mortar bookstores and mail order catalogs for books might offer 200,000 titles, an online bookstore can offer many times more. Bezos named his company "Amazon" after the largest river in the world.

The company was established in 1994 in Washington state, began its service in July 1995 and was reinstated in 1996 in Delaware. The first book ever sold by Amazon.com was Douglas Hofstadter Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the fundamentals of Thought.Amazon.com had its initial public offering on May 15, 1997, trading on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the symbol of the Amazon to price the IPO U.S. $ 18.00 per share (equivalent to U.S. $ 1.50 after three stock splits during the 1990s).

Initial Business Plan Amazon was unusual: the company does not expect a profit of four to five years. In retrospect, the strategy was effective. Amazon grew steadily in the late 1990, while many other Internet companies grew at a dazzling pace fast.

"Slow Amazonas growth led several of its shareholders to complain, saying the company did not reach profitability quickly enough. When the bursting of the dot-com bubble, many e-companies went out of business, Amazon persevered and finally turned its first profit in the fourth quarter of 2002: United States $ 5 million low as 1 ¢ per share on revenues of over U.S. $ 1 billion, but it is important symbolically.

The company has since remained profitable: net income was U.S. $ 35.3 million in 2003, USA $ 588.5 million in 2004, USA $ 359 million in 2005, and the U.S. $ 190 million in 2006 (including 662 million U.S. dollars U.S. burden of R & D in 2006). However, the company's accumulated profits remain negative. In September 2007, the accumulated deficit stood at 1.58 billion U.S. dollars USA.

Revenues continued to grow thanks to product diversification and international presence: U.S. 3.9 billion U.S. dollars in 2002, USA 5.3 billion dollars in 2003, USA 6.9 billion U.S. dollars in 2004, USA 8.5 billion U.S. dollars in 2005, and the U.S. 10.7 billion U.S. dollars in 2006. On 21 November 2005 Amazon entered the S & P 500, replacing AT & T after it merged with SBC Communications.

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

Merchant associations
Web sites across 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 to display similarly Amazon.com 's Toys & Games tab, yet this relationship was terminated as following a lawsuit.4.

Powers of Amazon.com and operates the websites selling the destination, the NBA, Sears Canada, Sears UK, Benefit Cosmetics, Bebe Stores, Timex Corporation, Marks & Spencer, Mothercare, Lacoste and Bombay Company now extinct. For a growing number of customers of the company, which currently include merchants the UK, Marks & Spencer and Mothercare, Amazon provides a unified multichannel platform from which a customer can interchangeably interact with the retail website, independent of the terminals of the store, and the phone-based customer service agents.

It also powers AOL's Shop @ AOL service through Web Technology Services.

The company's world headquarters is in Seattle, Beacon Hill in Washington. It has offices in Seattle and elsewhere Union Station and the Center for Columbia.

2.The product lines:

Amazon has not stopped branches in retail sales of music CDs, videos and DVDs, software, consumer electronics, kitchenware, tools, lawn and garden items, toys and games, baby products, apparel apparel, sporting goods, gourmet food, jewelry, watches, health and personal care items, beauty products, musical instruments, industrial and scientific supplies, food, and more.

The company launched Amazon.com Auctions of its own Web auctions service, in March 1999. However, no dent in the huge growth industry pioneer eBay. Amazon Auctions was followed by the launch of a fixed price business called zShops market in September 1999 and a failed Sotheby's / Amazon partnership called sothebys.amazon.com in November. Although zShops not live up to their expectations, which laid the foundations for a successful service Amazon Marketplace started in 2001 that let customers sell used books, CDs, DVDs and other products alongside new items. Amazon Marketplace main rival today is service eBay's Half.com.

Since August 2005, 5, Amazon began selling products under their own private label, "Pinzon", the trademark applications Initial suggested that the company intended to focus on textiles, kitchen utensils, and household goods.In March 2007, the company asked the extend the trademark to cover a larger and more diverse list of goods, and to record a new design that is PINZON "word in stylized letters with a notched letter O whose space appears in the "a" position. "6. The list of products registered for coverage under the brand grew to include items such as paintings, carpets, wallpaper, hair accessories, clothing, footwear, headgear, cleaning products, and jewelry.

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

In August 2007, Amazon announced Amazon Fresh, which offers a grocery perishable and nonperishable food. Customers can collect orders or have them delivered to their homes. Delivery is initially restricted to residents of Mercer Island, Washington, a wealthy suburb of Seattle.

3.Website:

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

The review function is an important and very influential to customers and one of the main reasons for amazon.com 's success in selling books. As with book reviews anywhere, the buyer must beware that all reviewers have bias. Under normal circumstances, the tests give the reader at least modestly for the evaluation of a particular book.

Because it is an open forum, the reader can benefit from a variety of perspectives. However, the anonymity Web reviewers increases the chances of abuse in the form of self-praise, praise from friends, or malicious criticism. This situation was confirmed in 2004 when the origin of reviews was accidentally made public in an Amazon site, and some authors openly confirmed their glowing reviews of his own books.

Amazon offers an optional emblem option for respondents, for example, to indicate the "real" name of the reviewer (based on a credit card) or to indicate that the reviewer is one of the "top" (most popular) reviewers. Some books have well over a thousand reviews (eg Ayn Rand's Atlas of the Rebellion) but many books, especially new ones, have none.

The U.S. site generally has the most reviews, but other country sites offer the perspectives of other reviewers. A study published in a site is not necessarily visible on another site.

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

To prevent copyright violations, Amazon.com does not not return the computer readable text of the book, but rather an image of the page that appears, disable printing, and places limits on the number of pages in a book by a single user can access. Amazon is planning to launch the search inside the book internationally. Moreover, Customers can purchase access to the entire book online via the Amazon Upgrade program, although the selection of law books for this service is currently limited.

According to information in Amazon.com discussion forums, Amazon derives about 40% of its sales from affiliates whom they call "associates." An associate is an independent seller or business that receives a commission for referring customers to the Amazon.com site.

Associate this by placing links on their web website to the Amazon homepage or to specific products. If this reference in a sale, the partner receives a commission from Amazon. Worldwide, Amazon has "Over 900,000 members" in its affiliate programs. Partners can access the Amazon catalog directly on their web pages by using Web Services Amazon (AWS) XML service.

Amazon was one of the leading firms program.AStore creating an affiliate marketing product is a new member that allows Associates to embedded a subset of Amazon products, or link from another site.

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

Events 4.Noteworthy:

In 2002, Amazon became the exclusive distributor of the much-hyped Segway Human Transporter. Bezos was one of the first of the Segway before its details were made public.

In June 21, 2003, Amazon coordinated what was at that moment one of the largest sales and distribution events in the history of e-commerce by selling over 1.3 million copies Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, since beaten by Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows with a sale of over 2 million copies preordered in 2007.

On July 16 2005, Amazon celebrated its 10th anniversary by telecasting a live worldwide organized by Bill Maher and artists such as Bob Dylan and Norah Jones.

5.Donations:

In 2001, Amazon was one of the first online stores to begin accepting donations to the Red Cross on behalf of 9 / 11 victims. For several days, The company devoted its entire home page for this cause.citation necessary

In 2004, Amazon launched its Presidential Candidates feature, whereby customers can donate $ 5 U.S. U.S. $ 200 for the campaigns of U.S. presidential candidates, resurrecting the Amazon Honor System for that purpose. The Honor System was originally launched in 2001 as a way for Amazon customers to "tip" from their "favorite Web sites and purchase digital content on the Web, "Amazon collecting 2.9% of payment, plus a flat fee of U.S. $ 0.30. has never been closed, but had fallen into relative disuse.

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

The same week, Amazon created similar channels for the British, Canadian, French, German, and Japanese Red Cross organizations through its international sites. Over 7,000 Britons donated more than U.S. $ 350,000 and 900 more than 56,000 Canadian dollars; French on U.S. 660 $ 23,000, 2,900 Germans, more than U.S. $ 145,000, and 1,900 Japanese over U.S. $ 66,000.

Amazon donation channel reactivated its Red Cross when Hurricane Katrina struck in late August 2005. From 8 September, over 98,000 payments have been made totaling over U.S. $ 10.7 million.

Use 6.Patent:

The company has been controversial for its alleged use of patents as a competitive constraint. The "1-click patent" is perhaps The best known example of this. Using Amazon for a patent, click against competitor Barnes and Noble's website led to the Free Software Foundation to announce a boycott of Amazon in December 1999.The boycott was suspended in September 2002.

On 12 May 2006, the USPTO ordered a reexamination of the "One-Click" patent, based in in an application filed by Peter Calveley. Calveley cited as prior art for a patent in early electronic commerce and electronic cash Digicash.

On 22 February 2000, the company was granted a patent covering an Internet-based system for customer reference, or what is commonly called a "program of affiliates. "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 the patent, 1-click patent and the affiliate program, and asking him to "avoid any attempts to limit the development Internet commerce.

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

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

Benoit 7.Chris DVD:

In late June 2007, shortly after the death of professional wrestler Chris Benoit, Amazon shows a special note in the pages of search results for the term "WWE", "tragic News of the WWE. 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. "

The title was followed by a photo and a link to purchase Hard Knocks: The Chris Benoit Story DVD. Amazon.com later removed after the message in question widespread complaints in the community of professional wrestling

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

Amazon continues to carry two magazines cockfighting and two dog fighting videos although the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) contends that the sale of these materials is a violation of U.S. federal law. The Humane Society of the United States has filed a lawsuit against Amazon. The HSUS is actively advise supporters to write Amazon Removal Request offensive materials.

This writing campaign gained momentum in August 2007 after the much publicized dog fighting case in which the quarterback of the NFL Michael Vick.Some supporters also called for a boycott of Amazon until the animal fighting materials 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

Phoenix Trading Artists (1 of