Company audit amazon.com - team 4
- 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.
- 27. AMAZON ON YOUTUBE:- 12 SURPRISING FACTS ABOUT AMAZON.COM
- 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.
- 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
- 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)
- 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 https://www.amazon.ca/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=13618121 8. References Sareen, H. (2013, September 4). Amazon.com and Social Media | Social Media Today. Retrieved March 28, 2014, from http://socialmediatoday.com/himanshu-sareen/1715836/why-amazon-most-social-least- social-friendly-commerce-platform Durst, L. (2010, November 23). Social Media - Why Amazon Doesn't Understand Social Commerce : MarketingProfs Article. Retrieved March 28, 2014, from http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2010/4049/why-amazon-doesnt-understand-social-commerce 9. Amazon products and services, Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon.com 10. Amazon products and services, Retrieve from http://aws.amazon.com/products/