Amazon Jeff Bezos’ Journey to Success

AMAZON

Jeff Bezos’ journey to success

Introduction

Jeff Bezos is an American entrepreneur, founder and chief executive officer of Amazon.com, an e-commerce business. Jeff Bezos founded Amazon.com in 1994 when the trend of online-retail was hardly available.

Jeff Bezos worked his way through selling books online and thus turning his business into a billion-dollar organisation which changed the face of retailing drastically. 

Amazon.com went public in 1997 with initially just dealing in books but later diversifying the business by dealing in CDs, clothing, appliances, toys.

Amazon.com continued expanding its business by providing diversified products and serviced to its customers including Amazon Prime, Kindle, Amazon Studios, etc. Jeff Bezos also invested in foundation of an Aerospace company, Blue Origin in the year 2000.

On August 5, 2013, Bezos announced his purchase of The Washington Post for $250 million in cash. (Paul, 2013)

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Challenges

The basic challenges that an e-commerce business faces include- finding the right product for selling; recognising and targeting the right customers to the business; developing the ideal prospects; retaining the customers in and attracting new customers to the business; choosing the perfect technology and most importantly attaining profitable long-term growth.  (TOOLS, Hassan & Campbell, 2019)

One of the problems that Jeff Bezos faced with Amazon in its initial period was lack of investors. In 1994, when Jeff Bezos founded Amazon.com, the online retail market was still a far off concept in the era of marketing and retailing. People and investors were reluctant to invest in a business which was a new concept for them. Due to lack of any prior experience in online-only retail business, public did not want to risk their funds in a business that might not result in any benefits and probably fail resulting in losses for the investors.

After Amazon.com’ launch in 1997, it was a challenge for Jeff Bezos to keep up with customer’s demands.  E-commerce business and traditional way of shopping had a very major difference and that was, Human contact. Because of the lack of human contact, people were hesitant to buy because they had no trust on a business which was new in the market and as well as new in terms of a concept. Jeff Bezos also had to keep in mind other factors that might scare of his customers like- delivery time, prices of the products, quality and after-sale services.

Because Amazon.com was an e-commerce business and widely used, it was important to avoid mistakes at every step of the process for Amazon.com to become a successful business.

1. Explain how Jeff Bezos changed Amazon from small company to a tech giant? 

Jeff Bezos believed everything could be achieved with a set of rules. His ideas that led to Amazon.com’ success was:

• Bezos believes that high standards are teachable rather than intrinsic. “Bring a new person onto a high standards team, and they’ll quickly adapt,” he says. “The opposite is also true.”
• To be able to have a successful business, the expectations set should be clear and realistic. The important and foremost requirement is to understand and set the grounds for the quality of goods and services should be followed by setting realistic and comprehensible expectations for the team about how much effort will it take to accomplish the level of quality set.
• His idea of a successful business also includes staying involved with the customers. He believes that no matter how huge the business is, it is important to always stay connected with the customers of the business. (Field, 2018)

2.  What did Jeff Bezos do? Explain

Bezos was confident about the business potential of e-commerce. He begun to develop the idea behind Amazon, the only thing remaining was to establish on the idea of the type of business with the most potential.

Amazon.com’ initial success was huge with almost no press promotions. Amazon.com did business in the US and 45 other countries within first 30 days.

Within 2 months of the business, sales reached $20,000 a week, which exceeded Bezos and his team’s expectations.

Bezos increased Amazon’s business by diversifying the products and services with sale of CDs and videos in 1998, and later started selling clothing, appliances, accessories etc.

While many dot.coms of the early '90s went bust, Amazon flourished with yearly sales that jumped from $510,000 in 1995 to over $17 billion in 2011. (Dodds, 2019)

3. Explain what is the customer obsession model?

Customer obsession model defines the model in which businesses are dedicated to their customers. It means regularly communicating to the customers, and then constantly try to improve based on customer’s preferences and experiences. Mostly the companies are marketing obsessed instead of customer obsessed. (Claveria, 2019)

“That’s why I always warn people, customer obsession is not always just listening to customers. Customer obsession is also inventing on their behalf because it’s not their job to invent for themselves.” Jeff Bezos

This is the fundamental driving force behind Amazon’s business.

4. What do you mean by disruptive business?

Large or small companies have predetermined goals for development and their focus is to make positive growth. Companies experience pressure due to the demand made by the equity markets to grow rapidly. Such companies that experience pressure to grow rapidly use disruptive business model to focus on creating product or service to beat their rivals and become the leading company in the industry. (Ashwini, 2017)

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