SUMMARY:

1) Amazon.com is the first large scale e-commerce shopping mall in virtual world.

2) In 2004 it hit $4 billion and by 2006 its sales guidance estimates $10 billion in revenue.

3) In 1995 former investment banker Jeff Bezos took advantages of new business
opportunities created by the internet by setting up a web site to sell books directly to
customer through internet.

4) At first its virtual bookstore offers a much larger selection of titles.

5) Bezos believed consumers did not need to actually ‘touch and feel’ a book before buying
it.

6) Amazon.com provided online synopses, tables of contents, and reviews to help with
selection.

7) Amazon.com was able to charge lower prices than physical book store.

8) Because it maintained very little of its own inventory and did not have to pay Maintaining
physical storefronts or a large retail sales staff.

9). Amazon tried to provide superior customer service through e-mail and telephone customer
support, automated order confirmation.

10).Online tracking and shipping information, and the ability to pay for purchases with a
single click of the mouse using credit card and personal information a customer had provided
during a previous purchase.

11).This was called ‘I- click’ express shopping and it made the shopping experience even
more convenient.

12).In 1998, Amazon started selling music, CDs, videos, and DVDs revising its business
Strategy to become the best place to buy.

13).Its offering grew to include electronics, toys, home improvement products, video Games,
apparel, government food, travel service, personal care and jewelry.

14).In 2001 and 2002 Amazon tried to increase revenue by cutting prices, offering free
shipping and leveraging its technology infrastructure to provide e-commerce services to other
businesses.

15).Amazon’s Merchants @ and Amazon market place allow other business to fully integrate
their websites into Amazon’s using Amazon’s fulfillment and payment system Nordstrom.

16).Amazon used six sigma quality measures to reduce errors in fulfillment.

17).Amazon finally become profitable in 2003 and remains an online retailing an online
retailing powerhouse growing at over 60 percent a year
QUESTION & ANSWERS:

1 Do SWOT analysis of amazon.com?

SWOT is an acronym for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats related to
organizations. The following table illustrates Amazon SWOT analysis:

Strengths

 Market leadership in the global scale

 Experience in extensive utilization of the first mover advantage
 Efficient and charismatic leadership by founder Jeff Bezos
 Cost leadership due to efficient cost structure
 Efficient customer relationship management

Weaknesses

 Seasonality of the business

 Low profit margins
 Lack of focus on product or service categories
 Weak competitive position of Amazon’s Fire Phone
 Damage to the brand image due to tax avoidance scandal in the UK

Opportunities

 Diversification of e-commerce business segment

 Increasing focus on own brand products and services
 Increasing physical presence of the brand
 Developing more local sites in international markets
 Engagement in strategic collaborations with companies in e-commerce and affiliated
industries

Threats

 The loss of profitability due to low profit margin

 Patent infringement and other lawsuits against the company
 Weakening of industry entry barriers
 Threats to online security
 The loss of market share post Jeff Bezos period
2 What are the competitive business strategies of amazon.com?

Amazon business strategy can be described as cost leadership taken to the extreme.
The global online retailer operates with a razor thin profit margin and succeeds due
to a combination of economies of scale, innovation of various business processes and
a constant business diversification. Amazon business strategy is guided by four
principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention,
commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking.
The following three points constitute the cornerstones of Amazon business strategy:
1. Regularly entering into new niches and segments. Started only as online shop for
selling physical books in 1997, today Amazon sells anything that can be sold online in
the global scale. Sophisticated global logistics represents one of the solid bases of
Amazon competitive advantage and the company has used this advantage extensively
to engage in successful business diversification. Recently, the company launched
Amazon Home Services, a simple way to buy and schedule local professional services
as a continuation of its diversification strategy.
2. Strengthening Amazon ecosystem. Amazon ecosystem consists of merchants,
writers, reviewers, publishers, apps developers, and the information market of
commentators, analysts, journalists and feature writers who get the word out about
opportunity on the Amazon platform. Amazon senior leadership engages in deriving
maximum benefit from each component of company ecosystem, as well as,
strengthening relationship between the components.
3. Focusing on Amazon leadership values. Gaining maximum contribution from
human resources is another source of Amazon competitive advantage. Working for
Amazon is highly challenging experience and employees are expected to take on
heavy workload, often sacrificing work-life balance. Amazon leadership values
consisting of 14 principles, such as customer obsession, insisting on the highest
standard and diving deep, play an instrumental role in terms of increasing the input
from human resources.

3 What is the future of Amazon.com?

From 1994, Seattle’s Amazon is simply astounding. It is the world’s largest online retailer, a
master of logistics, an oracle of computing power, a wrangler of digital content, a beacon of
customer service and reviews, and even innovative when it comes to conceiving handheld
electronic devices.

It began as a destination to buy books, and eventually other media. It then offered
marketplace services for online retailers and/or individuals (similar to eBay), while
simultaneously selling other physical goods for homes, offices, cars, and beyond. During the
shift to online retail, Amazon excelled by harnessing web data for optimize price, locating
warehouses to optimize logistics, and experimenting with delivery models (e.g. “Prime”) to
segment its consumers, all the while providing trust through customer service and reviews. In
its second decade, Amazon maintained its roots while becoming a player in the market for
digital media, cloud computing services, and, most recently, manufacturing its own handheld
electronic devices, a dizzying amount of diverse and complicated business lines to be
committed to, and yet it continues to hum along, executing its way to a $100B+ market cap
and an extremely bright future. Amazon is an e-commerce retailer formed originally to
provide consumers with products in two segments. It offers users with merchandise and
content purchased for resale from vendors and those offered by third-party sellers. Operating
in North American and International markets, Amazon provides its services through websites
such as Online Shopping for Electronics, Apparel, Computers, Books, DVDs &
more and Amazon.ca: Online shopping in Canada. It also enables authors, musicians,
filmmakers, Amazon is known for selling and delivering physical goods,

For a company that sold and delivered physical items, Amazon’s ability to add digital
goods to its arsenal has also been well-executed, to put it mildly.

Kindle is to Amazon as the iPod was to Apple. Many iOS and Android users read books on
these devices through Amazon’s Kindle app,

The future of Amazon is bright and also generates a dizzying amount of complex questions,
but given its history to date, its ability to execute on multiple fronts, often in parallel, and still
under the leadership of its dynamic, visionary founder, there’s little doubt that, over the next
decade, Amazon will continue to increase its dominance in many of these categories and also
earn influence in others. Like their name suggests, from everything from A to Z, Amazon is
that one brand, worldwide, which can fulfil demand and close the loop on the transaction and
delivery, and by owning the end-to-end process of selling these commodities, it has afforded
the company a war chest, mindshare, and the potential to grow even bigger. Seen through this
lens, Amazon may just be getting started. Read more at The Future of Amazon: Ambitious,
Diverse, and Expansive
 1. What is the difference between application software’s and system
software’s?
Ans :
 2. What is the difference between viruses and worms?
Ans:
3).What is the need of data management? Why is it difficult to manage data?
Ans. Data management is the development and execution of processes, architectures,
policies, practices and procedures in order to manage the information generated by an
organization.

Need Of Data Management.

First, a DMP helps you plan and organize your data collection by having you think through
the questions that will arise as you gather data. A DMP essentially documents key activities
in the research data lifecycle, such as the collection, description, preservation, and access or
discovery of data. Such documentation is crucial to reproducibility of research results which
is a fundamental precept of scientific investigations.

By laying out the blueprint for lifecycle management of data, a DMP provides valuable
details, such as how the data will be preserved for the long term, how and where the
researcher will make the data available for sharing, and whether reuse of the data, including
derivatives, will be allowed.

Second, related to reproducibility, a DMP can help prevent or reduce the likelihood of
mishaps such as data loss, data errors, and unethical uses of data. In effect, a DMP fosters
improved communication and accountability for data.

Third, data that has been generated by a federally funded project is publicly funded data - that
is, data that has been made possible by taxpayer dollars. As such, unless there are restrictions
or sensitivities about the data, these are data that should be made available to the public for
broad sharing and accessibility.

Finally, having a DMP reflects an understanding that the collected data have intrinsic value,
as illustrated in the video below. It can be another source of attribution and further
investigations. Indeed, as described by Dr. Alfred Traverse, Curator of the Penn State
Herbarium, in the following video, sometimes the collected data is all that remains for further
investigations.

4. Why did e-commerce become so popular all over the world?

Ecommerce is a business that is on the rise today and the internet’s vast potential has made it
easier for organizations to reach out to a larger pool of the people. In the real world, if you set
up shop at ‘x’ place, your target crowd will be the people from the nearby regions which
really limit the consumers you may get. But with the virtual internet world, there are no such
barriers. People could just come to your site, buy items and the only onus on you is to get the
items delivered to the correct destination. In this article, we enlist the reasons that have made
ecommerce business so very popular.

 As discussed earlier, the first and foremost cause behind the success of ecommerce
business is its reach. Ecommerce business operates on the internet platform and today
with the internet’s power, you could get far more customers than you could by
running an actual shop.
 Ecommerce business reduces destination barriers. With the internet, distance never
becomes an issue because the consumer can buy anything that he wants with the click
of a mouse.
 When compared to running an actual shop, the expenses involved with running an
ecommerce business is pretty low. When you run a store, you need to rent a place,
hire employees and also pay up for any peripheral costs such as electricity, water, etc.
With an ecommerce business, you are saved all of this trouble and thus can reduce
your expenses considerably.
 And it is exactly because of this reason that you could afford to sell items at a reduced
rate because often in a store, the product prices are inflated so as to balance the
peripheral costs incurred.
 There is yet another fine feature of ecommerce websites but before that we slightly
deviate to the topic of supermarkets. Why do you think they have become so very
popular? Reason being people can choose and select items as they wish and it their
own pace. The ecommerce facility too offers a service akin to the supermarket service
but makes it even better. The virtual shops are open 24 hours a day and people can
shop as and when they like.
 Affiliate marketing too is a killer service one gets by owning ecommerce websites and
it could boost one’s sales manifold. In this type of marketing, other websites will
place your products on their site and in case, they get sold, you need to pay them a
small part of the commission. The amount of revenue one can attain this way is
tremendous.

However in case you are planning to set up an ecommerce business, you need first seek the
advice of ecommerce developers. These ecommerce developers could advise you on many
topics such as the layout of the website, the audience that you should be targeting and tricks
that you should be employing to get more traffic and sales. It is a specialist’s job and thus you
need do good research before narrowing down on an ecommerce solution provider.

5. What is e-governance? How is it different from e-commerce?

Electronic governance or e-governance is the application of information and communication
technology (ICT) for delivering government services, exchange of information,
communication transactions, integration of various stand-alone systems and services between
government-to-citizen (G2C), government-to-business (G2B), government-to-government
(G2G) , government-to-employees (G2E) as well as back office processes and interactions
within the entire government framework. Through e-governance, government services will be
made available to citizens in a convenient, efficient and transparent manner. The three main
target groups that can be distinguished in governance concepts are government, citizens and
businesses/interest groups. In e-governance there are no distinct boundaries

6. What are the first, second and third order effect of information system when
introduced in modern organizations?