Business Case

Amazon.com is an American electronic commerce company based in Seattle, Washington. It was founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos. Originally, the company started selling books online. The company went public in 1997, trading on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the symbol AMZN (www.wikkipidia.com). Throughout the years Amazon has expanded its selection to include clothing, beauty products, house wares, and thousands of products.

Amazon being a powerful global brand is recognizable because of two main factors: It is one of the original dotcoms that developed a customer base of over 30 million people in a period of about 10 years, and also known as an initiator for online technologies for e-commerce that made it one of the first online-retailers.

The mission and strategy of the company is very simple as stated by its founder: “Amazon.com seeks to be the world's most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they may want to buy online, and endeavor to offer customer the lowest possible prices.”

Company SWOT Analysis

Strengths

Lower prices: The company operates on considerably lower prices than competitors. This is an advantage that has helped Amazon to be in the market even when others online companies have dropped out of business.

Bigger selections on books: Selling books online provides consumers with a virtually limitless selection of books available for their online glance or purchase. The online bookstore can sell many times more than a regular bookstore with no presence on the internet. Most orders through Amazon.com were placed directly through wholesalers and publishers, so no warehouse was needed. Amazon.com would simply receive the books from the other sources, and then ship them to the customer.

Website differentiation:. The advanced searching capabilities of the internet were exploited