Difference between revisions of "Amazon.com"

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(→‎Amazon Web Services: Expanded section to detail EC2, EBS, and the reddit blackouts associated with Amazon AWS failures.)
(→‎Amazon Web Services: added mention of redundancy created by splitting service across multiple subscriptions)
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Amazon Prime is a service that provides free two-day shipping on select items to customers who pay an annual amount for an Amazon Prime Membership. Currently, this membership costs $79 for US customers and is offered at $39 for students with a valid university email. In order for an item to be eligible for Amazon Prime, it must be either sold directly by Amazon.com, or a third-party seller must opt to have the item fulfilled by Amazon.<ref>[http://www.amazon.com/gp/prime Amazon.com]</ref> Third-party sellers interested in having an item fulfilled by amazon (FBA) send their inventory to an Amazon.com fulfillment warehouse, and Amazon.com will ship and provide all customer service for the item for a 10-12% fee.<ref name = services>[https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/fbacalc/fba-calculator.html Amazon Services: Fulfillment by Amazon Revenue Calculator]</ref>
 
Amazon Prime is a service that provides free two-day shipping on select items to customers who pay an annual amount for an Amazon Prime Membership. Currently, this membership costs $79 for US customers and is offered at $39 for students with a valid university email. In order for an item to be eligible for Amazon Prime, it must be either sold directly by Amazon.com, or a third-party seller must opt to have the item fulfilled by Amazon.<ref>[http://www.amazon.com/gp/prime Amazon.com]</ref> Third-party sellers interested in having an item fulfilled by amazon (FBA) send their inventory to an Amazon.com fulfillment warehouse, and Amazon.com will ship and provide all customer service for the item for a 10-12% fee.<ref name = services>[https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/fbacalc/fba-calculator.html Amazon Services: Fulfillment by Amazon Revenue Calculator]</ref>
  
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===Amazon Web Services===
 
 
[[File:amazonWS.jpeg|thumb|right|250px]]
 
[[File:amazonWS.jpeg|thumb|right|250px]]
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This division of amazon was founded in 2002 to rent cloud capabilities to clients. Among the 30 different services offered, Amazon EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud) is the most prominent. It rents computation and bandwidth to clients on an adjustable basis that accommodates bandwidth usage, processing power, and the client's budget. <ref name="arst_aws_outage">http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/10/amazon-web-services-outage-once-again-shows-reality-behind-the-cloud/</ref> One of it's advantages is ease of use for the clients. To set up an EC2 environment, clients select the operating system, services, databases, and application platform stack required for their applications.<ref name="amazon_AWS_support">[http://aws.amazon.com/application-hosting/ AWS Application Support]</ref>  Amazon EC2 provides a full management console and APIs to manage these consoles.<ref name="amazon_AWS_support"/> Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) is another AWS service. It is meant to support EC2 by offering a form of redundant networked storage.<ref name="amazon_ebs">https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/</ref>Although it is indistinguishable from a local hard drive to the EC2 instance, Amazon claims that EBS instances offer redundancy and scaling that automatically protects EC2 instances against outages. <ref name="amazon_ebs"/>
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This division of amazon was founded in 2002 to rent cloud capabilities to clients. Among the 30 different services offered, Amazon EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud) is the most prominent. It rents computation and bandwidth to clients on an adjustable basis that accommodates bandwidth usage, processing power, and the client's budget. <ref name="arst_aws_outage">http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/10/amazon-web-services-outage-once-again-shows-reality-behind-the-cloud/</ref> One of it's advantages is ease of use for the clients. To set up an EC2 environment, clients select the operating system, services, databases, and application platform stack required for their applications.<ref name="amazon_AWS_support">[http://aws.amazon.com/application-hosting/ AWS Application Support]</ref>  Amazon EC2 provides a full management console and APIs to manage these consoles.<ref name="amazon_AWS_support"/> Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) is another AWS service. It is meant to support EC2 by offering a form of redundant networked storage.<ref name="amazon_ebs">https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/</ref> Although it is indistinguishable from a local hard drive to the EC2 instance, Amazon claims that EBS instances offer redundancy and scaling that automatically protects EC2 instances against outages. <ref name="amazon_ebs"/>
  
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However, this protection is not fully effective as shown by AWS outages shutting down or impairing client services in the past. <ref name="arst_aws_outage"/> Prominent services affected by outages include [[Reddit]] and [[Instagram]] among others. <ref name="arst_aws_outage"/>. Although widespread outages of AWS services can shut down or impair a service, they are both brief and infrequent enough that many companies find that the benefits of the service outweigh the costs. <ref name="techcrunch_outages_cb">http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/30/could-instagram-and-other-sites-avoid-going-down-with-amazons-ship/</ref> Additionally, sites can mitigate the effects of the outage by changing their back-end architecture to resist the failure of individual storage devices, or by using EC2 without EBS.<ref name="twilioblog_aws_architecture">http://www.twilio.com/engineering/2011/04/22/why-twilio-wasnt-affected-by-todays-aws-issues/</ref>
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However, this protection is not completely effective. Firstly, the redundancy mechanisms are only offered within the service region that a client subscribes to. <ref name="amazon_ebs"/>  Secondly, past EBS outages have impaired and even completely shut down client services in the past. <ref name="arst_aws_outage"/> Prominent services affected by outages include [[Reddit]] and [[Instagram]] among others. <ref name="arst_aws_outage"/> Sites may be able to reduce their vulnerability by changing their back-end architecture to resist the failure of an individual storage device<ref name="twilioblog_aws_architecture">http://www.twilio.com/engineering/2011/04/22/why-twilio-wasnt-affected-by-todays-aws-issues/</ref> Similarly, Amazon suggests that customers may protect themselves by purchasing service in multiple regions to provide back-up in case of any single-region outage. <ref name="amazon_ebs"/>
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However, it may be that the only safe way to avoid the type of failure suffered in past AWS blackouts is to avoid using EBS with EC2 altogether. <ref name="twilioblog_aws_architecture"/> Despite the potential for EBS outages to shut down or impair a dependent site, many companies find the benefits of the service to outweigh the costs of occasional brief outages. <ref name="techcrunch_outages_cb">http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/30/could-instagram-and-other-sites-avoid-going-down-with-amazons-ship/</ref>.
  
 
===Amazon Mechanical Turk===
 
===Amazon Mechanical Turk===

Revision as of 03:41, 7 December 2012

←Back • ↑Topics • ↑Categories
amazon.com
Amazon-logo.jpg
AmazonStore.png
"Your Amazon.com: Online Shopping 2012" Site
Type E-Commerce
Cloud Based Storage
Software Developer
Hardware Developer
Launch Date 1995
Status Active
Product Line Shopping Website
Kindle Fire
Kindle eReader
Kindle Cloud Reader
Amazon Cloud Storage
Platform Cloud Service
Android Tablet
Android App
iOs App
Website www.amazon.com

A
mazon.com, Inc. is the largest e-commerce company worldwide.[1] The company is also known for its product line of Amazon Kindle e-book readers, Amazon Kindle Fire tablets, Amazon Web Services cloud computing services, and Amazon Mechanical Turk online marketplace for work. Jeff Bezos founded Amazon.com in 1995 in Seattle, Washington.[2] Amazon.com was originally limited to selling books, but it has expanded its inventory to include CD's, DVD's, electronics, apparel, or any other non-perishable good that can be shipped by mail.[2] Many of their services also raise interesting ethical questions. Examples of criticism against some of their services include allegations of a deceptive pricing system, an exploitable ratings system, ebooks limiting user rights, and accusations that their browser is designed in a manner that implicitly threatens user privacy.

History

Amazon.com in 1999

Jeff Bezos conceptualized Amazon.com in 1994 while working at D.E. Shaw & Co., a global investment management corporation. After weighing the pros and cons through a process he described as "regret minimization," he decided to leave D.E. Shaw in order to pursue his urge to found an online book selling company. Bezos believed e-commerce would become a very profitable business because the Supreme Court had recently decided online sales are not taxable. In addition, he believed online sales would follow a long-tail distribution, allowing Amazon.com to sell and carry books that would not be economical for a physical store to carry. Bezos sold his first book from his garage in 1995.[2]

Within the first month of launching the website, Amazon.com had a searchable database of one million books available and had received orders from all 50 states and 45 different countries. Amazon.com stocked roughly 2,000 of the most popular titles and would order the titles they did not stock from wholesalers and publishers. Jeff Bezos eventually moved Amazon.com's fulfillment center from his garage to an office location in Seattle once it was evident Amazon.com was becoming a highly successful operation. Between 1995 and 1997, Bezos added an additional half million titles, implemented an approach of discounting nearly all products by 10-30%, and created a review, recommendation, and notification system. In 1997, Amazon.com held its initial public offering of three million shares to raise capital for expansion. In order to minimize distribution time, Amazon.com opened a new distribution center in New Castle, Delaware. The new location minimized delivery times for both customers and amazon's internal orders from eastern publishing companies. Amazon.com also opened an "Associate" program, allowing other websites who hosted advertisements for books on Amazon.com to receive a commission of 8-15% if a consumer purchased the book after clicking on the ad. In October 1997, Amazon.com was the first website to announce reaching its one millionth customer. In March of 1998, Amazon.com had 2.6 million customers in its database, an increase of 1.6 million customers in just five months. Amazon.com continued to expand, entering the music business and purchasing IMDB in 1998. Between 1999 and 2001, Amazon.com's sales continued to climb; however, it continued to post net losses due to Bezos' focus on market share above profit. Many were skeptical of whether Amazon.com would turn a profit after losing over $1 billion over the course of seven years. In 2001, Amazon.com reported its first net profit, and in the second quarter of 2002, it reported its second net profit.[3]


Website

Reviews

Example of Amazon.com Product Review

Consumers can review sellers and products listed on the company's website through text or video. Amazon Seller Reviews are a review of a third-party seller's performance in selling the good the consumer purchased. Customers who intend to purchase a product on Amazon browse through a list of third-party sellers to choose which seller they would like to purchase the product from. The review system displays the sellers' aggregate rating along with the total number of people who have reviewed the seller. This can be useful information for a potential buyer and is key in establishing trust between the consumer and the third-party seller.

Amazon Product Reviews allow consumers to review the products they have purchased. First, they are asked to give a 1-5 star overall rating of the product. Second, they require a title for the review. Finally, they ask for a detailed written review or a video review of the product. In addition to the seller rating, this can be a useful tool to prospective customers of a product.

Third-Party Sellers

Roughly 40% of Amazon's profit is derived from its third-party sellers. Third-party sellers interested in selling on Amazon.com pay roughly an 8% commission to Amazon.com for products they fulfill. Sellers can opt to have their products fulfilled by Amazon.com for a 10-12% commission.[4][5] Amazon.com reported that 1.6 million sellers sold products through Amazon.com in 2009.[6] Unlike eBay payment for these products is handled directly through Amazon.com.


Products and Services

Retail Goods

Amazon.com sells a great selection of products including books, movies, music & games, electronics & computers, home, garden & tools, toys, baby products, grocery, beauty products, clothing, jewelry, industrial & scientific supplies, and sporting goods. Originally the company used the platform of web auctions service to sell its products. Unfortunately, it was an unsuccessful turn-out due to the existing competition with eBay. Amazon decided to changed its platform to a fixed-price marketplace business. As the result, Amazon.com was established and started expanding its market in the year of 1999.

Amazon Kindle

Kindle Fire HD

The Amazon Kindle is an electronic device that allows users to download, store and read electronic books, also known as e-books. The user can access the Amazon store with more than 115 000 e-books. The Kindle allows the customers also to read newspapers, magazines, blogs and even hear audio books and other MP3 files.[7] The word Kindle means "to set fire, to start a fire"[8], which explains the name given Amazon's newer Kindle tablets: Kindle Fire. The table was named by Michael Cronan[9] and made by lab 126, a company owned by Amazon.com whose main goal is to produce high-tech products.[10] The Kindle Fire is the first generation of Kindle to have a color touch screen. Along with the 7" LCD display, the Kindle Fire uses Android software. The device has 8GB of storage and a projected battery life of up to eight hours. The Kindle Fire is now available in an HD format as well.[11]

Amazon Prime

Amazon Prime is a service that provides free two-day shipping on select items to customers who pay an annual amount for an Amazon Prime Membership. Currently, this membership costs $79 for US customers and is offered at $39 for students with a valid university email. In order for an item to be eligible for Amazon Prime, it must be either sold directly by Amazon.com, or a third-party seller must opt to have the item fulfilled by Amazon.[12] Third-party sellers interested in having an item fulfilled by amazon (FBA) send their inventory to an Amazon.com fulfillment warehouse, and Amazon.com will ship and provide all customer service for the item for a 10-12% fee.[4]

AmazonWS.jpeg

This division of amazon was founded in 2002 to rent cloud capabilities to clients. Among the 30 different services offered, Amazon EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud) is the most prominent. It rents computation and bandwidth to clients on an adjustable basis that accommodates bandwidth usage, processing power, and the client's budget. [13] One of it's advantages is ease of use for the clients. To set up an EC2 environment, clients select the operating system, services, databases, and application platform stack required for their applications.[14] Amazon EC2 provides a full management console and APIs to manage these consoles.[14] Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) is another AWS service. It is meant to support EC2 by offering a form of redundant networked storage.[15] Although it is indistinguishable from a local hard drive to the EC2 instance, Amazon claims that EBS instances offer redundancy and scaling that automatically protects EC2 instances against outages. [15]

However, this protection is not completely effective. Firstly, the redundancy mechanisms are only offered within the service region that a client subscribes to. [15] Secondly, past EBS outages have impaired and even completely shut down client services in the past. [13] Prominent services affected by outages include Reddit and Instagram among others. [13] Sites may be able to reduce their vulnerability by changing their back-end architecture to resist the failure of an individual storage device[16] Similarly, Amazon suggests that customers may protect themselves by purchasing service in multiple regions to provide back-up in case of any single-region outage. [15] However, it may be that the only safe way to avoid the type of failure suffered in past AWS blackouts is to avoid using EBS with EC2 altogether. [16] Despite the potential for EBS outages to shut down or impair a dependent site, many companies find the benefits of the service to outweigh the costs of occasional brief outages. [17].

Amazon Mechanical Turk

Amazon Mechanical Turk gives businesses and developers a means of a large, cheap, and temporary workforce. The website is based on the idea that some tasks require a human to complete them, rather than a computer. Such tasks are dubbed Human Intelligence Tasks, or "HITs", and range from typing recipes to writing captions on pictures to transcribing recordings. Each HIT pays very little to the worker once the requester approves the work, anywhere from a few cents to a few dollars. Workers may either transfer the payments to an Amazon gift card or to their bank account, but may only do so after at least $10.00 is earned.[18]

Requesters must have an Amazon account and register for Amazon Mechanical Turk usage. When a worker appropriately completes a task, the requester must then pay the worker and Amazon fees through their Amazon account. Workers must comply to Amazon Mechanical Turk's policies, such as not using the site for illegal purposes.[19]

Workers must also have both an Amazon account and register to use Amazon Mechanical Turk. Workers may view available HITs and work on any HITs in which they are qualified to do. They may request qualifications in order to complete more HITs. The payment reward, time allotted, and expiration date are among the details listed for each HIT.[20]

Revenue

Amazon is one of the biggest retail stores in the world. It is currently the 15th largest retail store in the United States, the 56th largest store in America by market capitalization, and the largest Internet retailer.[21] Although Amazon.com is an online retailer, it has had negative impacts on businesses in the offline world. Amazon has caused many companies and stores to go out of business, since they are able to offer a wide variety of products in one place, often for lower prices than offline retailers.[22]

Ethical Controversies

Price Discrimination

In 2000, an account of price discrimination violating the Robinson-Patman Act was found on Amazon.com. A customer interested in buying a DVD discovered that after deleting his cookies, he was offered a lower price for the DVD. In addition, it was found that customers who had cookies from a bargain-hunter website were offered a substantially lower price ($51 less) on an mp3 player.[23]

A troll review of the "Three Wolf Moon" shirt

Review System

The Amazon.com review system has been challenged for its accuracy and integrity. In 2004, the New York Times discovered a number of Amazon book reviews were written by the authors themselves either promoting their own book or demoting their competitors' books.[24] The review system is also prone to being abused by internet trolls. Certain products such as the "Three Wolf Moon" t-shirt have gained media attention because of their exaggerated, and often fake, reviews claiming magic powers.[25]

eBook Ownership

Amazon came under criticism after releasing their e-book reader, the Kindle, when some purchasers realized that the books they buy are actually licensed to them, and can be revoked at any time - Amazon's terms give rights only to view the content of the book.[26] The company retains the right to delete customers' books, as well as to delete their accounts. This raises concerns for those considering the ebook to be their property. Some have complained that this resulted in a "bricked" Kindle, that is nearly useless.[27]

Amazon Silk Web Browser

In September 2011, Amazon announced a new Kindle series, featuring an updated version of its web browser, Silk. This new browser predicts the webpage users are most likely to visit next and preloads it in order to accelerate the browsing experience. In addition, it compiles worldwide web browsing trends to make it easier to find popular websites and emerging stories. Many tech-savvy consumers reacted negatively to the browser because all browsing data is sent to Amazon, and it was unknown how Amazon planned to use this data. Recognizing the concerns of his constituents, Congressman Edward Markey wrote Jeff Bezos, asking, "What information does Amazon plan to collect about users of the Kindle Fire? How does Amazon intend to use this information? Does Amazon plan to sell, rent, or otherwise make available this information to outside companies?" Bezos responded to these concerns, explaining that firstly, all the information is encrypted and therefore consumers are protected; and secondly, he stated that although this is the default setting, consumers can turn off this feature.[28]

See Also

External Links

References

  1. ↑ Internet Retailer: The Top 500 List
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Jeff Bezos: The Founder of Amazon.com
  3. ↑ FundingUniverse: History of Amazon, Inc.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Amazon Services: Fulfillment by Amazon Revenue Calculator
  5. ↑ Fulfillment by Amazon
  6. ↑ Market Watch: Third-Party Sales Fuel Overall Amazon Growth
  7. ↑ What is a Kindle?Retrieved October 31, 2012.
  8. ↑ Online Etymology Dictionary.Retrieved November 5, 2012.
  9. ↑ Fritinancy: How the Kindle Got Its NameRetrieved Nov 5,2012.
  10. ↑ Lab 126Retrieved Nov 5, 2012
  11. ↑ Amazon Fire Tablet Unveiled 7-inch Display $199 price tagRetrieved Nov 5,2012.
  12. ↑ Amazon.com
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 13.2 http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/10/amazon-web-services-outage-once-again-shows-reality-behind-the-cloud/
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 AWS Application Support
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 15.2 15.3 https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 http://www.twilio.com/engineering/2011/04/22/why-twilio-wasnt-affected-by-todays-aws-issues/
  17. ↑ http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/30/could-instagram-and-other-sites-avoid-going-down-with-amazons-ship/
  18. ↑ Amazon Mechanical Turk: FAQ
  19. ↑ Amazon Mechanical Turk: How do I pay for HITs?
  20. ↑ Mechanical Turk
  21. ↑ Will Amazon Take Over the World Retrieved Dec 1, 2012
  22. ↑ The Amazon Economy Retrieved Dec 1, 2012
  23. ↑ CNN: Web Sites Change Prices Based On Customers' Habits
  24. ↑ New York Times: Amazon Glitch Unmasks War Of Reviewers
  25. ↑ Know Your Meme: Three Wolf Moon
  26. ↑ Technology Guide: You Don't Own Your Amazon Kindle eBooks
  27. ↑ Mobile Read: Amazon has banned my account - my Kindle is now a (partial) brick
  28. ↑ http://www.techradar.com/us/news/mobile-computing/tablets/internet/web/is-amazon-silk-sinister-or-just-speedy-1037762

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