Amazon.com, Inc., a Fortune 500 company, opened its virtual doors on the World
Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers Earth’s Biggest Selection. We seek
to be Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and
discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavor to offer customers
the lowest possible prices.
Amazon.com and its affiliates operate retail websites, including: www.amazon.com,
www.amazon.co.uk, www.amazon.de, www.amazon.co.jp, www.amazon.fr, www.amazon.ca,
and www.joyo.com. We have organized our operations into two principal segments:
North America and International. The North America segment includes the operating
results of www.amazon.com and www.amazon.ca. The International segment includes
the operating results of www.amazon.co.uk, www.amazon.de, www.amazon.fr, www.amazon.co.jp,
and www.joyo.com. In addition, we operate other websites, including www.a9.com
and www.alexa.com that enable search and navigation; www.imdb.com, a comprehensive
movie database; and Amazon Mechanical Turk at www.mturk.com which provides a
web service for computers to integrate a network of humans directly into their
processes.
Business Strategy
Our business strategy is to relentlessly focus on customer experience by offering
our customers low prices, convenience, and a wide selection of merchandise,
to provide e-commerce solutions and services to other businesses and to offer
web services applications to developers.
Price
We endeavor to offer our customers the lowest prices possible through low everyday
product pricing and free shipping offers. We also strive to improve our operating
efficiencies so that we can pass along the associated savings to our customers
in the form of lower prices. We enable third-party sellers to offer products
on our sites, in many instances alongside our product selection, and set their
own retail prices.
Convenience
Our software engineers, computer scientists, and management team focus on continuous
innovation to provide further convenience for our customers. We work to earn
repeat purchases by providing easy-to-use functionality, fast and reliable fulfillment,
timely customer service, feature-rich content, and a trusted transaction environment.
Key features of our websites include editorial and customer reviews; manufacturer
product information; gift guides; Web pages tailored to individual preferences,
such as recommendations and notifications; 1-Click® technology; secure payment
systems; image uploads; digital content; searching on our websites as well as
the Internet; browsing; and the ability to view selected interior pages and
citations, and search the entire contents of many of the books we offer with
our “Look Inside the Book” and “Search Inside the Book”
features. Our community of online customers also creates feature-rich content,
including product reviews, online recommendation lists, wish lists, buying guides,
and wedding and baby registries.
We endeavor to fulfill customer orders quickly, and to provide intuitive self-service
features that assist our customers when they have questions. We communicate
our fulfillment promise in several ways, such as presenting up-to-date inventory
availability information, delivery date estimates, and options for expedited
delivery, as well as delivery shipment notifications. Additionally, customers
can use the “Your Account” website features to track order and shipment
status, review estimated delivery dates, cancel unshipped items, change delivery
instructions and payment options, combine orders, edit gift options, and return
items.
We fulfill customer orders in a number of ways, including through our U.S.
and international fulfillment centers and warehouses; through fulfillment centers
operated under co-sourcing arrangements, including our fulfillment center supporting
www.amazon.co.jp; through outsourced fulfillment providers, including our fulfillment
providers supporting www.amazon.ca; and through other third-party fulfillment
arrangements. We operate customer service centers globally, which are supplemented
by several co-sourcing customer service arrangements with third parties. See
Item 2 of Part I, “Properties,” for additional information about
fulfillment centers and customer service locations.
Selection
To provide the widest possible selection for our customers worldwide, we have
designed our websites to enable millions of unique products to be sold by us
and by third parties across dozens of product categories such as:
• Apparel, shoes, and accessories
• Home, garden, and outdoor living products
• Baby care products
• Jewelry and watches
• Beauty
• Kitchenware and housewares
• Books
• Magazine subscriptions
• Camera and photography
• Music and musical instruments
• Cell phones and service
• Office products
• Computers and computer add-ons
• Software
• Consumer electronics
• Sports and outdoors
• DVDs, including rentals and videos
• Tools and hardware
• Gourmet food
• Toys and video games
• Health and personal care
Amazon.com Retail
We source and sell a broad range of products to our customers worldwide across
dozens of product categories. Additionally, through our Syndicated Stores program,
we utilize our e-commerce services, features, and technologies to sell our products
through other businesses’ websites, such as www.borders.com.
Third-Party Sellers
Through Amazon Services, we offer Amazon Marketplace and Merchants@ programs
that enable third parties to sell their products on our websites, allow customers
to shop for products owned by third parties using our features and technologies,
and allow individuals to complete transactions that include multiple sellers
in a single checkout process. We are not the seller of record in these third-party
seller transactions, but instead earn fixed fees, sales commissions, per-unit
activity fees, or some combination thereof.
Amazon Marketplace generally serves individuals and small businesses, enabling
them to offer their products for sale on our websites alongside our products
and products made available by other third-party sellers. Our Merchants@ program
generally serves larger, branded businesses and is primarily focused on expanding
the selection of new products available on our websites. We also sometimes offer
fulfillment-related services to third-party sellers.
Services
Amazon Enterprise Solutions (formerly known as Merchant.com) provides third
party retailers with back-end e-commerce and fulfillment solutions to enable
third party e-commerce businesses operating under their own brand name and website
address (e.g. www.target.com). We also offer web services applications to developers.
In addition, we have co-branded credit card agreements and marketing and promotional
services, such as online advertising.
Competition
The environment for our products and services is intensely competitive. Our
current and potential competitors include: (1) physical-world retailers, catalog
retailers, publishers, vendors, distributors and manufacturers of our products,
many of which possess significant brand awareness, sales volume, and customer
bases, and some of which currently sell, or may sell, products or services through
the Internet, mail order, or direct marketing; (2) other online e-commerce sites;
(3) a number of indirect competitors, including media companies, Web portals,
comparison shopping websites, and Web search engines, either directly or in
collaboration with other retailers; and (4) companies that provide e-commerce
services, including website development; third-party fulfillment and customer-service.
We believe that the principal competitive factors in our market segments include
selection, price, availability, convenience, information, discovery, brand recognition,
personalized services, accessibility, customer service, reliability, speed of
fulfillment, ease of use, and ability to adapt to changing conditions, as well
as our customers’ overall experience and trust in transactions with us
and facilitated by us on behalf of third-party sellers. For services we offer
to business and individual sellers, additional competitive factors include the
quality of our services and tools, our ability to facilitate sales for third
parties we serve, and the speed of performance for our services. Other companies
also may enter into business combinations or alliances that strengthen their
competitive positions.