An Analysis of Amazon E-commerce Business - Research Paper Example

In the past few years, the field of information technology has experienced an incredible speed of growth. Additionally, these advancements and developments in information technology have brought a lot of changes in the ways people understand, think and carry out tasks in the 21st century. No doubt, information technology has a serious influence over almost all the parts of our life for the reason that it plays a significant role in every walk of life. On the other hand, this amazing growth of information and communication technology has made it necessary for the businesses to make efficient and useful use of innovative tools and technologies with the purpose of surviving in this ever-increasing competitive world.

However, the implementations of this modern technology cannot bring perfection in the organizational performance if they are not efficiently planned and implemented (Ellahi and Manarvi). Additionally, the ways individuals and business organizations carry out their everyday activities and survive in the twenty-first century are determined by means of the massive network of countless networks (comprising all the kinds of networks such as LANs, MANs, WANs etc.) that is normally known as the Internet.

In addition, without limitations and restrictions throughout the world presence of the Internet for carrying out personal as well as business related tasks such as business deals between consumers and organizations is the basic reason behind the creation of a most attractive trend that is known as the electronic commerce (or simply e-commerce). In this scenario, define electronic commerce as an innovative process of buying and selling services and goods and products. (i.e. performing all the kinds of dealings) electronically by making use of electronic or computer based systems over the Internet, networks, and other digital technologies”.

Though, e-commerce is not limited to just some of the business dealings but it also involves a lot of other activities that relate to those business transactions including business advertising, marketing, processing payment and offering customer support. In fact, by replacing formal and traditional manual and paper-based methods of business management with electronic methods, as well as through superior information flows in most modern and dynamic ways, electronic commerce does not just provide the businesses and customers with a potential to increase speed of the business processes such as ordering, payment for products, delivery, services and goods but also diminishes the working and supply and delivery related expenses of the businesses (Laudon and Laudon 25).

In order to support the e-commerce related activities the Internet offers a wonderful technology known as the World Wide Web (WWW) that is a widespread place for carrying out e-commerce activities, building and implementing most recent tools and technologies for the businesses to stay in touch with each other and their partners and customers (Norton 371). This report is based on a detailed analysis of a large e-commerce business. For this purpose I have chosen e-commerce business platform ‘Amazon’.

In this report, I will discuss an overview of this retail business platform with respect to various other features such as how this e-commerce solution creates competitive advantage for the firm, investigation of how the business unit approached e-commerce solution, e-commerce solutions strategy and what were desired and actual outcomes. In the last, I will also present a set of recommendations. Before we present an overview the Amazon’s e-commerce business, we should be well familiar with the concepts that are associated with e-commerce.

The discussion of these concepts will help us better understand