The Amazon.com Evolution, Essay Example

Since its inception in 1994, Amazon.com has been an online marketplace characterized by widely divergent approaches and trajectories of business. Even its origin was unusual and seemingly out of touch with prevalent trends in online retailing; in a decade when sellers were focusing on increasingly technologically advanced media product, the Seattle-based Amazon set out to sell only books. As the online venue could offer millions of titles in contrast to the brick-and-mortar availabilities of thousands, the concept quickly became an established and popular Internet presence, and shortly afterward began retailing other inventories.

The great dichotomy within the Amazon.com machine lies in its continued status as both titan of online commerce and perpetually shifting, and seemingly spontaneous, smaller business. This contradiction works to ensure Amazon’s place in a continually expanding Internet arena. For example, the company’s widely acknowledged expectation of not achieving a profit margin for several years after its debut was viewed as radical and self-defeating in a world wherein online businesses were immediately anticipating and broadcasting high profits, yet it served to foster a public confidence; it sent a message that the dealer was in it for the long haul, and could therefore be relied upon.

Then, Amazon.com has never put forth a corporate facade as an especially savvy or prescient retail giant. It adapts to competition and demands in a visible and unapologetic way, keeping pace and often surpassing the newest threat to its market hold. The largest of these was eBay and Amazon, soon after eBay’s meteoric rise in the ‘auction’ sphere of online merchandising, lost no time in wooing private sellers to its own pages, expediting the membership and sales processes and establishing itself as the ‘other’ eBay.

Above all, Amazon.com maintains an enormous competency within online industries through a ceaseless diversification. Along with serving as an umbrella market for well-known brands and other retailers, the firm continues to develop new opportunities. “In the future, (CEO) Bezos sees Amazon’s greatest growth potential in international markets…” (Pride, Ferrell, 2007, p.79). Through such potentially risky expansions, Amazon.com retains its place as an online monolith which is relentlessly moving and changing.

Works Cited

Pride, W.M., Ferrell, O.C.  Foundations of Marketing  (2007). Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.