* EC Look Out Point * O

what's your opinion ? :

3:53 PM

♥彡Success Story of Amazon.com and its causes.

Some Fun Facts about Amazon.com

If Amazon’s 66 million active customers all lived in the same country, it would be the world’s 19th most populous country, larger than every European country except Germany. And if every US household spent $130 at Amazon.com this year, the total amount they’d spend would still be less than Amazon’s 2007 revenues of almost $14 billion. It actually started as an online bookstore named "Cadabra.com", a name quickly abandoned because it sounds similar to "cadaver" (which means dead body/corpse). Later, it was renamed as "Amazon" after the world's biggest river.

History and Success causes

Amazon.com, Inc. is an American electronic commerce (e-commerce) company located in Seattle, Washington. It is America's largest online retailer, with nearly three times the internet sales revenue of runner up Staples, Inc. Founded in 1995 by Jeff Bezos as an online bookstore, Amazon has since greatly expanded its business. Amazon has since established separate websites in Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, China, and Japan. Today, Amazon’s stated mission is to be a place where “people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.”

Its key pillars of lowering price, offering convenience, expanding selection, and increasing availability are interrelated in what the company calls a virtuous cycle, and together make up the foundation of the fabulous growth that has taken Amazon from a bookstore started in a garage to a $14Billion retail machine. Amazon’s direct-to-consumer online model allows it to keep its inventory in a small number of strategically located large warehouses, letting the company offer a vast selection of goods (removing the risk of relying on any particular product line) and without the capital investment and inventory risk that traditional shop retailers face.

Amazon has used the internet to create a truly global business platform, one which is poised for incredible growth in the coming decade. Sales have increase tremendously in the last year at the world's largest E-commerce company, growing 39% from a combination of low prices, shipping promotions, and roll outs of new product categories. Revenues increased thanks to product diversification and an international presence: $3.9 billion in 2002, $5.3 billion in 2003, $6.9 billion in 2004, $8.5 billion in 2005, and $10.7 billion in 2006.

While most people naturally think of Amazon as the internet superstore that sells products in over forty categories, from books to electronics to groceries to jewelry to auto parts, the company has gradually expanded beyond that simple business platform; today Amazon is simultaneously an E-commerce and internet technology platform, a fulfillment and logistics platform, a search technology, an internet advertising platform, and even an internet start up incubator.

Due to sophisticated inventory forecasting, fast inventory turns, and overall operational efficiency, Amazon has managed to build a retail business with a negative operating cashflow cycle, which means Amazon gets paid for products by customers before they have to pay their suppliers for the goods. Working capital has effectively become a source of investment cash for the company.

http://www.amazon.com/

what's your opinion ? :

0 comments

2:19 PM

♥彡The failure of CNET.com and its causes.

An Example of an E-commerce failure and its causes

An example of E-commerce failure is such as the technology website CNET.com. There are lists over 40 incidents of real-world site outages, outlining how these failures were detected, the estimated downtime, and the subsequent recovery action of this websites. We mainly classified the causes of failures in Web applications into four categories namely: software failures, operator error, hardware and environmental failures, and security violations. We focus on non-malicious failures but list some failures that occur due to security violations for the sake of completeness. First, the incidents of software failures on the Web suggest that a large number of non-malicious failures occur during routine maintenance, software upgrades and system integration. It is unclear whether these failures are mainly due to system complexity, inadequate testing and/or poor understanding of system dependencies since site owners tend to be vague about the underlying cause of the failure. Other significant causes of software failure are system overload, resource exhaustion and complex fault-recovery routines. Next, Human/Operator Errors which are classified configuration errors, procedural errors and miscellaneous accidents. Configuration errors occur when operators define incorrect settings for system parameters, example specifying an insufficient number threads to service user requests to the web server. Procedural errors occur when the operator either omits an action or executes an incorrect action during system maintenance. Beside this, hardware and environmental failures can occur for several reasons. For example, wear and tear of mechanical parts, design flaws and loose wiring. Next, the causes of failures can also due to the security violations for the sake of completeness. Some of the common security violations that occur in websites are password disclosures, Denial of Service (DOS) attacks, worms and viruses, browser vulnerabilities, authentication failures and thefts. While for the manifestation of the failure typically falls within the following broad categories which are partial or entire site unavailable for example the user’s request times out causing the user to receive error notices such as "404 file not found". This may be due to server crashes and hangs, network congestion or denial of service attacks. System exceptions and access violations which means the executing process often terminates abruptly when a system exception is thrown. The error messages that arise vary depending on the error handling within the application that crashed, example the system may display a very detailed access violation message with addresses and numbers, or nothing at all. Incorrect results which means the executing process does not terminate but returns erroneous results, example the site serves blank pages, returns wrong pages or wrong items. Since no exceptions are thrown, these failures are usually discovered only after a customer complains. Next, data loss or corruption occurs when users are unable to access data from a previously functioning computer system, example due to the accidental erasure of data. Corruption is probably the most difficult problem to diagnose. Corruption typically occurs from a boundary overwrite in memory. Lastly, performance slowdowns may occur due to a variety of reasons, example server overload, process hangs, deadlocks, resource exhaustion and network congestion.