The Development of E-Business
TheDevelopment of E-Business
TheDevelopment of E-Business
E-businessis a form of business whereby the operations of the company and theirtransaction with its clients occur online. A customer orders productfrom the website of the company which is then delivered to him or hervia supply chain system (Bardopoulos, 2015). This paper describesvarious elements of E-business as well as the transformations thatAmazon has undergone from the time of time inception to date.
TheStructure, History, and Growth of Amazon
Structure
Thefounder of Amazon Jeff Bezos operates as the president and CEO ofthe company. The main headquarter of the company is located inSeattle, Washington, and it has over 97,000 employees who aredistributed across its offices located in different parts of theworld.Theleadership structure of the company is as shown below (Amazon, 2017).
History
Thecreation of the electronic data interchange in 1960’s stimulatedthe emergence of E-commerce industry in the 1970s. EDI facilitatesthe exchange of various business documents which made it possible totransact online. The internet and electronic data interchange (EDI)have made it possible to establish online stores and use digitaltechniques to reach out to the potential customers (Bardopoulos,2015). Amazon became one of the pioneer companies to venture into theindustry it started in 1994 as a small bookstore known hasCadabra.com (Amazon, 2017).
Growth
Theindustry has currently grown to become one of the most lucrativeindustry that is viable for investment. It covers business toconsumers (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) trade. Today manycompanies are operating in the industry. They sell a wide range ofproduct as well as services. Apart from Amazon, the other e-businesscompanies included eBay, salesforce.com, Accenture and Google. Theindustry is currently in the growth stage of development and iscausing disruption in the market. Businesses that started as brickand mortar are trying to venture into the sector that is currentlydominated by Amazon.
Amazoninitially targeted the American market. It has since expanded itsmarket share to become a multinational company. It started abookstore but has since diversified its operations. It currentlyoffers a wide range of products such as retail goods, digitalcontent, Amazon videos, Amazon Web Services and many others. It didnot make any profit until the year 2001 when it registered a profitof $5 million its current annual revenue stands at $61.09 Billion(Amazon, 2017).
Amazon’sWebsite
Thecompany’s mainwebsiteis Amazon.com. The website has an excellent design that makes it easyto use. Its structure is as shown below.
Itallows potential users to create an account by signing up to accessthe various services and products. The user can then use the searchengine to look for the product that he or she would like to purchaseand then add it to cart. The client can then check out by paying viatheir preferred payment mode (Bernstein, 2015).
Themajor components of the website are ‘Shopall Department’ which allow the customers to access all the productoffered, cart, which temporarily hold the items to be purchased.Besides, the website offersshippingand tracking service which allows the customers to establish thestatus of their order. Gift and wish list service are used to rewardthe customers and allow them to monitor the items that they wouldlike to buy.
SCM,B2B and B2C Models of Amazon
Supply Chain Management (SCM)
Theeconomies of scale enable Amazon to sell their products at relativelylower cost as compared to that of their competitor this has alsoenabled them to create an efficient supply chain management thatfacilitates faster delivery of merchandise to the customers.Customers who are subscribed to Amazon Prime are given a two-dayfree shipping on items ordered. The company is also planning inducingdrone facilitate faster delivery of merchandise (Bernstein, 2015).
Business-To-Business (B2B)
Amazonuses a diverse B2B model. Different businesses are allowed to selldirectly on Amazon platform they create their own pages where theylist their items and pay the company subscription fee. Amazon alsohas an efficient payment system, and the business that operates onAmazon website can receive payment from the customers with Amazonaccount. The company liaise with suppliers to deliver shipments tothe desired destination (Hollensen& Opresnik, 2015).
Business-To-Consumer (B2C)
Thereis a link between the Amazon’s business-to-consumer andbusiness-to-business model in that they are able to indirectly servetheir clients by allowing other businesses to list and sell theirproduct on Amazon website. Apart from sourcing for goods and servicesfrom other companies. Amazon also sells its own products.Thecompany is highly adaptable, and this is indicated by their abilityto expand the range of product that they offer, apart from consumergoods, the company started selling digital products such as videosand music to meet the demand if the customers (Hollensen& Opresnik, 2015).
Legaland Regulatory Requirements for SCM
Legaland regulatory measures are put in place to facilitate the process ofsupply chain management and reduce the risk as associated with it aswell as the security threats to the merchandise. The operations oflogistic companies are supposed to conform to the regulations createdby the oversight authorities which aims at streamlining supply chainactivities.
EthicalIssues
Fraudis prevalent in e-business due to the nature of the business. Thecustomer does not physically interact with the company`s sales agent.A number of people are reluctant in giving their financialinformation such the details of the credit card due to the fear ofbeing defrauded by cyber frauds (Bardopoulos, 2015). The operation ofe-business is different from the traditional business where the buyerinteracts with the seller and therefore reduce cases of fraud. Also,the item purchased may not have the exact features as specified inthe website thus inconveniencing the buyer. This cannot happen in thecontext of the traditional business since the buyer is given theproduct immediately the transaction is completed.
Conclusion
Finally,Amazonis the world’s leading company operating in the e-businessindustry. The company need to leverage on their competitive advantageand innovation to improve their operations.The management should study the market trend to establish profitablebusiness ventures. The e-business is a highly dynamic industry, andAmazon should embrace technology-based strategies that wouldstrengthen their core competencies.
References
Amazon.(2017). Amazon.jobs: Help us build Earth’s most customer-centriccompany. Retrieved from https://www.amazon.jobs/
Bardopoulos, A. M.(2015). eCommerce and the Effects of Technology on Taxation: CouldVAT be the eTax Solution? Cham: Springer InternationalPublishing.
Bernstein, D.(2015). Is Amazon Becoming the New Cool Software Company forDevelopers? IEEE Cloud Computing, 2(1), 69-71.doi:10.1109/mcc.2015.10
Hollensen, S.,& Opresnik, M. O. (2015). 2.6 Comparing B2B and B2CMarkets. Marketing, 128-129. doi:10.15358/9783800649297-128
No related posts.