Amazon.com's e-business strategy and order management system

Amazon.com

The approach of first planning, piloting and then implementing extensive a customized order management system to support their online retail storefront is what many Amazon.com senior executives credit with their survival and growth. No systems were in place for individually ordering a book then having it shipped to a consumer. In solving this problem, Amazon.com set the foundation for their e-business strategy that would focus heavily on transactions and systems integration, and would eventually lead to Amazon Web Services being offered. On the e-commerce side, Amazon.com's initial website was able to rapidly add content, features including user ratings, and many more due to the e-business foundation being in place. It is the intent of this paper to discuss how Amazon.com uses e-business and e-commerce for serving both B2B and B2C markets.

E-Business and the Platform Matter Most

Ingram Book Company is the largest book distributor in the U.S. And ships typically a minimum order size of over 100 books. Amazon.com founders worked with Ingram to create a unique order management system that would allow for a single book to be ordered and fulfilled from Amazon's warehouses and also automatically trigger a re-order in real time. This would alleviate stockouts. Amazon learned its most valuable lessons about e-business during this period, automating their supply chain and service (Cenfetelli, Benbasat, Al-Natour, 2008). From a B2C standpoint this development ensured that the company would be able to deliver all the book orders taken on their website on time. Without the e-business structure in place, the center of which was their order management system, Amazon.com would have likely gone the way of so many online retailers who failed to deliver products when they were ordered and promised. From a B2B standpoint, e-business also led to the company creating Amazon Web Services, where companies can use their Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform to create hosted applications (Feigenbaum, Parkes, Pennock, 2009). Many social networking companies and websites are using this service with the most well-known being Twitter.

E-Commerce and the User Experience