http://instagram.com/solitaryisle https://www.amazon.com/b?_encoding=UTF8&tag=freestuff0f1-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=f85841760b2af1f076d01d440a718738&camp=1789&creative=9325&node=172282.
The direct Amazon-to-buyer sales approach is really no different from what happens at most other large, online retailers except for its range of products. You can find beauty supplies, clothing, jewelry, gourmet food, sporting goods, pet supplies, books, CDs, DVDs, computers, furniture, toys, garden supplies, bedding and almost anything else you might want to buy. What makes Amazon a giant is in the details. Besides its tremendous product range, Amazon makes every possible attempt to customize the buyer experience. Amazon knows you by name and tries to be your personal shopper. The embedded marketing techniques that Amazon employs to personalize your experience are probably the best example of the company’s overall approach to sales: Know your customer very, very well. Customer tracking is an Amazon stronghold. If you let the Web site stick a cookie on your hard drive, you’ll find yourself on the receiving end of all sorts of useful features that make your shopping experience pretty cool, like recommendations based on past purchases and lists of reviews and guides written by users who purchased the products you’re looking at.
You can find straight sales of merchandise sold directly by Amazon, like the books it sold back in the mid-’90s out of Jeff Bezos’ garage — only now they’re shipped from a very big warehouse. Since 2000, you can also find goods listed by third-party sellers — individuals, small companies and retailers like Target and Toys ‘R Us. You can find used goods, refurbished goods and auctions. You could say that Amazon is simply the ultimate hub for selling merchandise on the Web, except that the company has recently added a more extroverted angle to its strategy. In addition to the affiliate program that lets anybody post Amazon links earn a commission on click-through sales, there’s now a program that lets those affiliates (Amazon calls them “associates”) build entire Web sites based on Amazon’s platform. They can literally create mini Amazon Web sites if they want to, building on Amazon’s huge database of products and applications for their own purposes. Amazon has become a software developer’s playground.
Before we dig deeper into Amazon’s e-commerce methods, let’s take a quick look at the technology infrastructure that makes the whole thing possible. Amazon has four software development centers worldwide. The central Amazon data warehouse is made up of 28 Hewlett Packard servers, with four CPUs per node, running Oracle 9i database software. The data warehouse is roughly divided into three functions: query, historical data and ETL (extract, transform, and load — a primary database function that pulls data from one source and integrates it into another). The query servers (24.7 TB capacity) contain 15 TB of raw data in 2005; the click history servers (18.5 TB capacity) hold 14 TB of raw data; and the ETL cluster (7.8 TB capacity) contains 5 TB of raw data. Amazon’s technology architecture handles millions of back-end operations every day as well as queries from more than half a million third-party sellers. Amazon’s sales volume means that hundreds of thousands of people send their credit card numbers to Amazon’s servers every day, and security is a major concern.
In addition to automatically encrypting credit card numbers during the checkout process, Amazon lets users choose to encrypt every piece of information they enter, like their name, address and gender. Amazon employs the Netscape Secure Commerce Server using the SSL (secure socket layer) protocol (see How Encryption Works to learn about SSL). It stores all credit card numbers in a separate database that’s not Internet-accessible, cutting off that possible entry point for hackers. Customers who are particularly cautious can choose to enter only a partial credit card number over the Internet and then provide the rest by phone once the online order is submitted. Now let’s get back to the business of selling stuff. Amazon’s approach to e-commerce is one that leaves no stone unturned. Amazon has tried to patent nearly every aspect of its e-commerce architecture, drawing more than a little controversy for the affiliate program patent it won back in 2000. Reportedly, other e-commerce sites were already using affiliate programs that looked a lot like the one Amazon developed and patented.
Internet-based customer referral system, U.S. Content personalization based on actions performed during a current browsing session, U.S. Method and system for integrating transaction mechanisms over multiple internet sites, U.S. It started as a bookseller, pure and simple, and over the last decade has branched out into additional product areas and the third-party sales that now represent a good chunk of its revenue (some estimates put it at 25 percent). At Marketplace, sellers offer goods at a fixed price, and at Auctions they sell their stuff to the highest bidder. Amazon zShops features only used goods at fixed prices. The level of integration that occurs on Amazon is a programming feat that few (if any) online sales sites can match. Another sales channel called Amazon Advantage is a place where people can sell new books, music and movies directly from the Amazon warehouse instead of from their home or store. Sellers ship a number of units to Amazon, and Amazon handles the entire sales transaction from start to finish. Th is data has been done with GSA Content Generator DEMO!
