E-Commerce

Internet shopping, also known as "e-tail" (Foley, 2001) is the process of buying and selling merchandise over the Internet. "eBusiness" is rapidly replacing traditional business for virtually any type of retail transaction. Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com was a visionary that was able to see the benefit of efficiently leveraging the retail sale of books by means of the Internet. While others such as Pierre Omidyar (eBay) also had the vision, it was Bezos that had the most complete vision and the ability to bring the appropriate resources to bear to capitalize on the opportunity. As such, his vision has become the point of reference for any organization that is looking to sell product in the online environment (Ramo, 1999, 1).

Bezos has taken his original model and expanded it beyond its original niche (books) and today the company sells everything from power tools to CDs and is continually looking for new areas in which to expand (Ramo, 1999, 2). The new global nature of the marketplace is such that those individuals empowered with the greatest amount of information will win (Ramo, 1999, 2).

Books are the most targeted for buying and selling on line, Amazon.com is the biggest ecommerce center for selling and buying books online. Sometimes it can be overwhelming going to the book store and looking at all the books in a category and deciding which one you want. At Amazon you can search a book by title, author or subject, then you can read customer reviews on that book and decide much faster which book you want. For the seller it is an easy way to recycle your read books and make a profit instead of them sitting around cluttering shelves or in boxes. On Amazon you can choose from a brand new book or used, from experience I have purchased used books, when I received them they looked brand new and for a very reasonable price. Almost every book you would want it is there and if it is not, you can post a request and you will get the book. You do need a credit to make purchases, or better yet PayPal, a very secure way of using internet purchases.

Downloading books on line have become very popular you can download to your PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry and now the Kindle. The Kindle Store (amazon.com) has over 540,000 Kindle books, including 105 of 112 New York Times® Best Sellers, starting from $9.99. You can even read thousands of free books, or get free book samples, read the first chapter for free before you decide to buy. Whisper sync technology saves and synchronizes your last page read, bookmarks, notes, and highlights across your devices. You can adjust text size to make reading more comfortable. Oh yes Amazon owns Kindle.

Many users still experience confusion with on-line stores and probably the biggest irritant is the issue of returning merchandise.