Amazon.com: Culture of Metrics

Why a case study on Amazon? Surely everyone knows about who Amazon are and what they do? Yes, well, that may be true, but this case goes beyond the surface to review some of the ‘insider secrets’ of Amazon’s success.

Like eBay, Amazon.com was born in 1995. The name reflected the vision of Jeff Bezos to produce a large-scale phenomenon like the River Amazon. This ambition has proved justified since, just 8 years later, Amazon passed the 5$billion sales mark – it took Wal-Mart 20 years to achieve this.

By 2008, Amazon is a global brand with over 76 million active customers accounts and order fulfillment to more than 200 countries. Despite this volume of sales, at 31 December 2007, Amazon employed approximately 17,000 full-time and part-time employees. In September 2007, it launched Amazon MP3, a la carte DRM-free MP3 music downloads, which now includes over 3.1 million songs from more than 270,000 artists.

Vision and Strategy

In their 2008, SEC filing, Amazon describes the vision of their business as to:

Relentlessly focus on customer experience by offering our customers low prices, convenience, and a wide selection of merchandise.

The vision is to offer Earth’s biggest selection and to be Earth’s most customer-centric company. Consider how these core marketing messages summarizing the Amazon online value proposition are communicated both on-site and through offline communications.

Of course, achieving customer loyalty and repeat purchases has been key to Amazon’s success. Many dot-coms failed because they succeeded in achieving awareness, but not loyalty. Amazon achieved both. In their SEC filing they stress how they seek to achieve this. They say: We work to earn repeat purchases by providing easy-to-se functionality, fast and reliable fulfillment, timely customer service, feature rich content,