Amazon

Amazon: The company born in a garage

From humble beginnings in a garage. To global dominance.

Born in the garage of a young Jeff Bezos, and with an overall evolution matured by more than 25 years of experience and change, Amazon is today universally recognised as one of the world’s most famous brands, and certainly the most famous in the e-commerce sector. With a turnover of USD 513.98 billion in 2022 and around 1,600,000 employees worldwide, it is considered the world’s largest internet company and its website registers around 310 million customers worldwide and a total of around 2 million visits per month.

The key to success: diversification

Undoubtedly, at the root of the platform’s success is its remarkable ability to diversify over the years, taking Amazon from a simple online bookstore to a company able to offer its customers a heterogeneous range of products and services. This has allowed it to enter a wide variety of market sectors, potentially attracting an ever-widening customer base.

A strategically chosen name inspired by nature.

The initial project was born in 1994, when Jeff Bezos decided to open the headquarters of an online bookstore in the garage of his house, which would allow the sale of books worldwide and appeal to a global customer base. The name, according to the founder himself, would be inspired by the Amazon River and its mighty flow, and would strategically begin with the letter A to appear at the top of customers’ search lists.

The bursting of the Dot-com bubble

Amazon’s growth was also aided by luck, as it benefited from the bursting of the dot-com bubble, which led to the bankruptcy of many competitors and facilitated the increase in buying and selling on Amazon’s platform.  In fact, the late 1990s saw a proliferation of small and medium-sized IT companies, which soon led to the formation of a speculative bubble that led to the crisis and bankruptcy of most of the IT companies born in those years.

From listing on the stock exchange to achieving international recognition.

The rapid success of the platform is also reflected in its listing on the stock exchange in 1997 and the front page of The Times in 1999, when its founder, Jeff Bezos, was named Man of the Year.

Technological innovation: from Kindle to Alexa

As mentioned above, Amazon is no longer just an online bookstore: many products have been produced over the years. In 2009, for example, it launched the first Kindle for reading books in electronic format, and in 2014 it launched Amazon Alexa, the first intelligent personal assistant on the market. However, diversification projects have also failed, such as the Amazon-branded smartphone called the Fire Phone, which never made it to market.

Amazon Prime: fast delivery and exclusive services.

Another feature of the services offered by Amazon is the high degree of customisation and the numerous options for upgrading the service. For example, since 2005, Amazon has offered the Amazon Prime delivery service, which allows customers to pay a monthly or annual subscription fee to receive their purchases within a short delivery time, as well as other services such as Prime Music music streaming or Prime Video TV series and films. The latter two services are another example of the diversification of the offer, as they represent the company’s entry into the streaming platform sector and have been very successful commercially.

Amazon Prime Day: building customer loyalty with discounts

The sales initiatives mentioned above also include Amazon Prime Days, which offer discounts to registered customers and are designed to increase customer loyalty.

New challenges: the hardware sector.

Over the past year, Amazon has started to develop the production of products in some specific areas, with a view to further diversifying investments and productivity. In March 2023, for example, it began producing PC components: a CPU cooling fan marketed under the AmazonBasics line. In addition to the product itself, it is important to note that this gesture is quite striking from a strategic point of view: the American company is trying to carve out a slice of the PC hardware market by starting to produce basic components for computers.

Amazon Go

Another business decision that received a great deal of media attention around the world was to focus on physical commerce in stores in 2023. This latter stance, in stark contrast to the online market on which Amazon has always focused, finds its ultimate realisation in the Amazon Go physical store project.

Structured as smart supermarkets, they use a complex system of cameras, sensors and digital readers to better track the most elusive products. Artificial intelligence and advanced computer vision technologies complete the autonomous customer guidance: the customer is artificially followed by the cameras throughout his or her tour, and these technologies understand with absolute precision what he or she has picked up, what he or she has put in the trolley and what he or she may have placed on the shelf.

Digital payments and full automation.

The shopping trolley and the final online payment are all managed by the dedicated app, which also records the customer’s entries.

An ambitious project for the future of retail.

The project is very ambitious and essentially aims to create a store that can operate completely autonomously in terms of managing purchases and payments.

A future full of opportunities and challenges.

It is therefore easy to see how diversification is one of the most characteristic features of the company, which has always tried to take different paths, even in sectors far removed from the original e-commerce and publishing sectors. Some of these have not yielded the desired results, while others have been very successful. The brand still has a long way to go and who knows what the future will bring