The world's Largest online retailer began with books and now sells even food. What's the secret? How big is too big?

"When given the choice of obesessing over competitors or customers, we always obsess over customers,” said Jeff Bezos last summer, marking the company’s 15th anniversary. “We really like to start with customers and work backwards. That’s the key thing I know, and it covers a lot of other mistakes.”

There certainly have been blunders in the company’s first decade and a half. Yet following Bezos’ simple philosophy, Amazon defined online commerce and reshaped the book business.

The site began to play the role of that relative, neighbour or co-worker whose book or musical taste you usually agree with. Recommendations by others who share customers’ tastes became a powerful tool, spawning today’s user-driven Web 2.0.

Web Setting the standard. According to Robert Spector, author of Amazon.com: Get Big Fast, “Amazon.com set the standards for buying, setting, bidding, and trading on the internet. The company tailored existing technology to suit its needs and developed its own software when ‘off-the-shelf ’ products wouldn’t do.”

A central innovation was 1-Click checkout, backed by many other unseen cogs meshing into a hyper-efficient distribution infrastructure. This in turn has bred customer loyalty that makes Amazon the envy of competitors such as Barnes & Noble and Overstock.com. Only eBay has a comparable following – one which Amazon is directly trying to woo with its similar Amazon Marketplace.

One loyal customer with long Amazon experience both as a buyer and seller is author Celeste White, founder of Keswick House Publishers and managing editor of the California literary magazine Hot Air Quarterly. “I started using Amazon as a buyer in the mid-nineties, soon after they launched,” she says. “I love it for the fact that I can find just about any title I’m looking for, ...

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TEXT: WIF STENGER PHOTOS: ISTOCKPHOTO
Twentyfour7, Issue no.04.2009

“The first thing I know is that you have to obsess over customers,” says Amazon’s CEO and founder Jeff
Bezos. That level of obsession has created the world’s biggest online retailer. Yet some analysts warn that Amazon.com has grown too big for its own good.

Hi-Tech Papyrus
One of the boldest – and riskiest – moves in Amazon’s 15-year history came two years ago when it launched its electronic book reader, the Kindle. Critics called it ugly, hard to read, overpriced and doomed to failure because it lacked full web access.

They were soon proved wrong. The popularity of the Kindle sent the company scrambling to keep up with demand, overhauling its manufacturing and distribution systems in the process.

This past February, Amazon released the Kindle2, aimed at eradicating the initial version’s bugs. The bigger KindleDX, tailored for textbooks and newspapers, appeared three months later. Both sold briskly.

Some users continued to complain about the low contrast of the ‘e-ink’, its poor ergonomics and its user-unfriendly access to e-books. It also lacked an SD card slot and a light or self-replaceable battery. And there are still huge gaps in Kindle title availability – for instance no books by Graham Greene or Vladimir Nabokov. However, in September, Jeff Bezos’ alma mater, Princeton, became one of several US universities to replace printed textbooks with the KindleDX for certain courses.

Says Prof. Harriet Flower, who uses the device in her course Religion and Magic in Ancient Rome: “The Kindle offers opportunities for students of classics to experience reading in a manner closer to that practiced in antiquity. The Kindle is much closer in format to a papyrus roll than to a modern book.”

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