Quatre E-Commerce World

An example of a successful E-commerce website I would like to discuss is Amazon.com. Amazon.com, inc. a Fortune 500 e-commerce company is based in Seattle, WA. The company was founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994. Since it first kick start online in the year 1995, Jeff Bezos and his handful of employees spent late summer nights packing books in a tiny warehouse, scrambling to ship a growing gush of orders. They started out as an online bookstore and then diversified by adding other items, such as VHS tapes, DVDs, Music CDs, Software, video games, electronics, MP3s, clothing, furniture, toys and even food items.

Amazon has nearly 49 million active customers. With $6.92 billion in sales in 2004, Amazon ranked at the top of Internet Retailer's annual top 400 list, well ahead of computer maker Dell Inc., which posted $3.25 billion in online business-to-consumer sales. Office Depot Inc., which has a partnership with Amazon, was not far behind with $3.1 billion. The company remains profitable with $8.5 billion in 2005 and $10.7 billion in 2006. On January 15, 2009, a survey published by Verdict Research found that Amazon was the UK's favorite music and video retailer, and came third in overall retail rankings.

Reasons of Success
The main reason for Amazon.com success is because of its focus on customer’s experience. This factor is infused in all levels throughout the company. Amazon’s emphasis on customer’s experience as a team’s responsible, not a person’s responsible. Customer’s experience is a combination of listening really hard to the customers and innovating on their behalf. They will make adjustments to their services to make their customers more confident and comfortable with buying online. Amazon.com has a Web metrics group that is responsible to measure sales metrics and monitor them in various increments of time – by the minute, by the day, or longer. The interview with Maryam Mohit from Amazon.com tells us more.

Besides that, motivation is also a very important factor that gave a minority contribution to the success of Amazon.com today. When Amazon was struggling to make profits for the first time, only its founder Jeff Bezos believed that the business goal could be achieved in a year's time. Everybody was astounded when Jeff Bezos achieved his goal after one year.

Amazon changed the way it operates its business throughout the years. First, it was an online book seller. Then, it expanded into selling other items which its customers are demanding for. Amazon has constantly evolving its product lines, which makes its competitors having a hard time catching up. When the Internet's stock market bubble burst, Amazon re-structured.

More on the reasons of its success, Jeff Bezos took the opportunity to embrace the technology. When the company went public in 1997, skeptics wondered if an Internet-based start-up bookseller could maintain its position once traditional retail heavyweights like Barnes and Noble or Borders entered the Internet picture. The skeptics see Amazon’s rapid growth move as a doom factor, but a few analysts sees it as “one of the smartest strategies in business history”.


For more details, these are some useful links which will explain further on the survival of Amazon.com, Inc. throughout the years:

>> How Amazon.com survived, thrived and turned a profit

>> Amazon: E-Commerce Success Story

>> Inside the Mind of Jeff Bezos

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Amazon.com is the well-known web which was the first major companies to sell goods by Internet. The fundamental revenue of Amazon.com is by generating sales revenue by selling books, computer software’s, video games, etc online. In addition, Amazon.com sanctions independent sellers to sell new and used items under a fixed-price basis on Amazon website via Amazon Marketplace. Amazon will charge a minimal fees based on the sale price, transaction fee and variable closing fee.

Additionally, Amazon.com also generates affiliate fees through Amazon.com Associates. This is a place where can earn up to 15% in referral by advertising Amazon product through Links & Banners, Widgets, and AStore. AStore is an Amazon.com affiliate product which website owners can use to customize an online store on their site in minutes and without the need for programming skills. However, website owner does not allow selling their own product directly but picking products offered by Amazon’s Store and earn referral fees on the products purchased by the reader.

eBay.com is an online auction and shopping website which allow peoples over the world to buy and sell variety of goods and services over the internet. eBay revenue model is totally different from Google and Amazon.com. eBay generates most of its revenue through various sources of fees. There is a list of fees that charged by eBay when customer would like to place an item for sale or auction such as fees to list a product (Insertion Fee) and fees when the product sells (Final Value Fee) plus several optional adornment fees.

In addition, eBay now owns the PayPal payment system which has fees of its own. PayPal is an example of a payment intermediary service that facilitates worldwide e-commerce. It allow user to execute online payment process to online vendors, auction sites and other commercial users for a minimal charges of fee. Besides that, eBay also runs an affiliate program beneath the name of eBay Partner Network. Fees are paid a percentage of the eBay seller's transaction fees. The payout is 50% to 75% of the fees paid for an item purchased.

by, melsiew

more info at:-

- online business

- organic spam

- taming the beast

- boutell

- parand

E-Commerce is a process of the carrying out the commercial transaction electronically with the help of the leading technologies via internet. It is the process of buying and selling of products and services by businesses and consumers through modern technologies. There are three main categories which are business to business (B2B), business to consumer (B2C) and consumer to consumer (C2C).

History of e-commerce begins in the prehistoric days of Arpanet. The history of this vast improving system is how information technology has changed business processes into how it is at the present. At early 1960s, Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) was first being brought in as a set of standards to exchange business information and execute electronic transactions. At that time, several dissimilar EDI formats that business could use, so companies still might not be able to interact with each other.

Then again, in the year 1984, an EDI named as ASCX12 has expand and was effortlessly accepted by new businesses for transfer of huge amount of data and transactions. However, in year 1992, the first web browser- Mosaic was developed and being widely used and later on Netscape was quickly adapted into downloadable software which permissible easier access to e-commerce.

In addition, the development of DSL was another significant moment in the development of e-commerce. DSL allowed quicker access and a persistent connection to the Internet. In 1998, it was the highlight in the development of e-commerce which achieve 1 billion online sales with AOL and the development of Red Hat Linux was also another major step in e-commerce growth. Linux stood as a very good opportunity against the Windows as it was consistent and open sourced option for consumers. With huge competition from Linux, Windows began expanding its ability to deal with e-commerce matter.

A major merger between AOL and Time Warner in early 2000 was another major push for e-commerce. By then, Yahoo, eBay and Amazon.com were popular sites, their names synonymous with Internet use and e-commerce. The need for high security where e-commerce was concerned developed as the hackers attacked these sites in the year 2000. It is predicted that that revenues, up until 2006, will grow 40% to 50% yearly. Expectations of higher prices as well as larger profits for e-commerce business are also present. Also, we will see a larger presence by experienced traditional companies, such as Wal-Mart, on the Internet.

Lastly, e-commerce is a history of a new, virtual world which is evolving according to the customers’ advantage. The evolution of this will never end as long as technology breaths in the air, it will continue improving for the better. E-commerce has come a long way, evolving from organizations billboards to a fully functional personalized shopping experience. Although the road was bumpy from 1994-2004, it has now become a crucial part of Internet pioneers and technology innovators.

by, melsiew

more info at:-

- wikipedia

- e-commerce as a revenue stream

- e-commerce wordpress