Analysis of Amazon Website - A Research Paper Examplpe

Apparently, analysis of a website is giving a comprehensive report that collects information and data from the website and people using it so as to get to know whether the goals that had been set have been achieved by the website. Various companies conduct website analysis for various reasons which include knowing whether the website is effective, what competitors do with web pages and can also be helpful in designing a new website. In this paper, we are going to carry out an analysis of Amazon website which is a world leading online retail shopping services starting from its business model, features/services, its security, and payment system and the websites marketing concepts and targets.

Business Model/Type

The business model can be seen as how a company conducts its business without going deep into companys details of the plan, developments, components, guidelines, etc. The Amazon companys logo is created in such a way that it means that it sells everything from A-Z. There is an arrow connecting A and Z which represents the joy and happiness that the customers would experience when shopping at Amazon.com (Rawal & Upadhayay, 2017). In order to describe Amazon's business model effectively, we are going to have nine building blocks, and this can be known as the business model canvas. They included:

Customer segments

Amazon is a massive consumer market and multi-sided. Amazon offers a widespread diversity of goods and services thus meets customer expectation (Sari, 2017). It is in more than 100 countries and can be accessed by any gender above eighteen years old. Amazons massive growth has being due to the fact that many customers gave testimonies of their good customer service and also had positive media stories. These reputations have made Amazon a trusted brand among its customers this is evident because sixty per cent of the orders made were from the repeat customers.

Value prepositions

We can summarize the Amazon value proposition as having the best hardware, fair cost of goods and services and a good customer care relationship

Amazon is also the worlds best innovative company, best customer-centric company and best in logistic services

Channels

Amazon has various websites such as Amazon.com, Amazon.in, amazon.co.uk, etc

Other channels at Amazon include mobile apps, affiliates, retail channels, logistics network, APIs, AWS platform, social media, PR, conferences, and events

Customer relationship

Amazon has good customer relationship since it offers free shipping within Amazon prime, it is fully digital, self-service and has automated service. It also allows customers to give reviews of the websites products.

Revenue streams

Apparently, the company earns money by taking a small percentage of each product purchased through its website. It also earns through advertisements whereby products are charged so as to be listed as featured products. Other incomes include Amazon prime video subscription, AWS services income, Amazon hardware.

Key activities

Key activities include software development and maintenance, logistics and distribution, fulfilment, innovation, content aggregation merchandising.

Key resources

Amazon has a multilevel e-commerce strategy, and its key resources include; physical warehouses, robotic systems, big data, intellectual property, patents, staff, brand. Key partners

These include affiliates, network of sellers, suppliers and manufacturers, logistics providers, publishers, AWS Partner Network (APN), Amazon payments global partner program, joint ventures and lastly mergers and acquisitions.

There have also been partnership with Nike who would be selling their products on Amazon

There is also Amazon subsidiary like Beijing Century Joyo courier services, Books Amazon, Junglee.com, Twitch.tv, Endless.com

Cost structure

Amazon is cost driven and has the large economies of scale. It is dedicated to improving price and processes

Amazon has a strong investment in India, new projects, warehouses, offices, employees, R&D, IT maintenance, software development, content generation.

Analysis of Features/Services, Interactions

In the past ten years, amazon has led globally in web services and have largely embraced cloud platform. Amazon web services (AWS) has more than seventy featured services for databases, internet of things, computer storage, mobile and also enterprise applications from different countries. Various services include;

Compute Amazon EC2 (virtual servers in the cloud)

Amazon EC2 Auto scaling (scale compute capacity to meet demand), Amazon elastic container service for Kubernetes (run managed kubernetes on AWS), AWS Far gate (run containers without managing servers or clusters), VMware Cloud without Custom Hardware (build a Hybrid cloud without custom hardware)

Storage - Amazon S3 (scalable storage in the cloud)

Amazon customers enjoys the storage services offered at a low cost. Example of the storage services include the Amazon Glacier which offers a relative low cost archive storage in cloud, AWS storage gateway which is an hybrid storage integration

Database

Amazon Aurora (high performed managed relational database)

AWS IoT core (connect devices to cloud)

Amazon FreeRTOS (IoT operating systems for microcontrollers), AWS Green grass (local computer messaging and Sync for devices), AWS IoT 1-click (one click creation of an AWS Lambda Trigger)

There are also other services such as Alexa Voice Service (AVS) which make voice interaction easier. AVS is an artificial intelligent service which understands natural language and also voice recognition (Nasiopoulos, Ioanna, Lida, Paraskevi, & Giakomidou, 2017). AVS contains Cloud-based intelligence, easy to use APIs, custom skills, smart home control, streaming media and localization

Another service includes the Amazon simple workflow service generally known as SWF. It is helpful in coordinating jobs across distributed application components (Osterwalder & Pigneur, 2010). Its application ranges from media processing, web application backends, business process workflows.

Analysis of security and payment system

Amazon web services (AWS) have employed an AWS data centre that helps to control the security of any customers information. This is accomplished by thoroughly managing potential flood and seismic activity. Some of the techniques used to improve security include:

Use of physical barriers

Employing security guards

Use of threat detection technology

Use of in-depth screening process

Backing up systems

Frequently testing the pieces of equipment and processes

Training the employee to expect the unexpected

External auditors are used to doing testing in more than 2,600 standards and requirements so as to ensure the validity of the security of the data centres.

Payment systems on Amazon have been made easy by amazon pay which is an online payment service. Various types of online payment systems includes PayPal, Net Bank, Google wallet, Wechat wallet, Authorize.Net and AliPay. Customers are able to pay either using their Amazon accounts on external merchant websites. There are two pay products available on Amazon which include;

Amazon pay this allows customers to make payments of goods and services using mobile apps and websites.

Amazon pays express It is suitable for customers buying or selling a small number of products.

Analysis of Marketing Concepts and Sectors/Targets

According to Amazon, its customers are very important, and so as to meet their expectations, they have employed a technique of customer segmentation. This works by offering customers recommendations based on their purchasing patterns or history (Curty & Zhang, 2013). For example, if a customer purchases from the website, when he/she gets back to the site one will automatically get recommendations related to what you had purchased earlier. Amazon also uses information from other websites like Twitter, Google, YouTube and generally social media platforms in order to know their customers' preferences. Marketing automation at Amazon has had a positive effect since it combines many social media platforms to automate repetitive tasks hence improving working efficiency.

Amazons consumer-centric strategy has really helped it to know the shopping behaviour of its customers thus making them be ahead than their competitors. Its business culture of innovation and customer satisfaction has made it one of the leading amongst its competitors. Amazon success in marketing is based on the following pillars

It is customer-friendly

Reliable communication systems

Its ability to understand the universal behaviours and mentalities

A wide variety of goods from small scale to large scale

Exploitation of its associates goods and services

Conclusion

There are various general security risks related to the use of virtual server images which are found in cloud services providers. For example, the Amazon EC2 service has had security problems whereby the users and providers were exposed to hazards such as unauthorised access and malware attack which could lead to loss of vital information.

The company should, therefore, make a website that has no loophole to security risks such as addressing the issue of the Amazon EC2 service.

References

Curty, R. G., & Zhang, P. (2013). Website features that gave rise to social commerce: a historical analysis. Electronic commerce research and applications, 12(4), 260-279.

Nasiopoulos, D. K., Ioanna, D., Lida, G., Paraskevi, P., & Giakomidou, D. S. (2017). Modeling of B2C Communication Strategies in Electronic Commerce. In Strategic Innovative Marketing (pp. 531-537). Springer, Cham.

Osterwalder, A., & Pigneur, Y. (2010). Business model generation: a handbook for visionaries, game changers, and challengers. John Wiley & Sons.

Rawal, P., & Upadhayay, S. (2017). CRM: Building Long Lasting Customer Relationships.

Sari, R. P. (2017). Marketing Mix Implementation in Small Medium Enterprises: A Study of Galeristorey Online Business. Etikonomi, 16(1), 115-126.