Amazon Case Study

Founded in Seattle, Washington by Jeff Bezos in 1994, Amazon.com became one of the first major companies in the retail industry to sell goods over the internet. Amazon.com began as an online bookstore but quickly diversified its sales inventory by adding music products, toys, electronic software and many more lines of trade to the business. Amazon.com made its first public offering on May 15, 1997 making trades available on the NASDAQ stock exchange with the ticker symbol AMZN. The price of the Initial Public Offering (IPO) was $18.00 per share. In the late 1900s the company had three stock splits in order to have more stock to offer making the initial stock $1.50 which is $18 divided into 8. Amazon.com sold its first book by Douglas Hofstadters’s called Fluid Concepts &Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought.

Amazon.com has branches of the company engaging in sales with customers in many other countries such as Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Austria, France and China. Doing so gives Amazon.com a greater opportunity to meet the needs of their customers and target consumers of all different levels. Anything from the Torah or Koran to Harry Potter or Harvard Buisness Essentials is offered to supply customers of any religion and age. Different options for New or Used books make it easy for people to afford what they need besides for membership programs and specials for families of three. Shipping and handling fees are waved to selected areas outside the operating areas to make it more realistic for them to use Amazon.com.

Amazon.com is found generously lending a hand to the society and engages in many philanthropic acts with fund raising and donation campaigns. As noted in Wikipedia, “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 dedicated its entire home page for this cause……. In 2004, Amazon launched its Presidential Candidates feature, whereby customers could donate from $5.00 to $200 to the campaigns of U.S. Presidential Hopefuls, resurrecting the Amazon Honor System for the purpose. The Honor System was originally launched in 2001 as a way for Amazon customers to “tip” their favorite Web sites and to buy digital content on the Web, “Amazon collecting 2.9% of the payment plus a flat fee of 30 cents………At the end of 2004, with the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami in the Indian Ocean, Amazon set up an online donation channel to the American Red Cross using the Honor System, waving its processing fee. As of January 3, 2005, over 162,000 individuals had donated over $13.1 million in this way and once again with Hurricane Katrina receiving over $10.7 million.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon.com).

Two Major competitors to Amazon.com are Barnes & Noble and Ebay. As shown on the following page, (http://finance.yahoo.com/q/co?s=AMZN) as of Sept.