Amazon's operational details

Amazon is a Fortune 500 company and the largest online e-commerce company in the United States. Located in Seattle, Washington, it was established in July 1995. It has become the online retailer with the largest variety of goods in the world. Let me introduce you to the details of Amazon's operation.

The details of Amazon's operation are all in Amazon, you can hardly get any allowance, and the performance bonus will not be more than you expected, but the company is much more generous than it was in the 1990s. At that time, Bezos didn't even want to issue bus cards to employees, because he didn't want employees to find any reason to hurry out of the office in order to catch the last bus of the day.

Amazon employees now have bus cards and can take buses in Seattle for free. Parking your car in the Amazon office building in Nanhu Alliance Zone costs $220 per month, and the company can reimburse 180. In the Amazon conference room, flat tables without drawers are arranged side by side to form a conference table. Vending machines have to be bought by credit card, and there is no subsidy for eating in the company cafeteria. New employees will receive a backpack, which contains a power adapter, a laptop base and some training materials for newcomers. When employees resign, the company will ask them to return all the things distributed, including backpacks. Because Amazon's 14 leadership principle says:

We avoid spending money on things that are not important to our customers. Not wasting money can cultivate our ability to solve problems and be self-reliant, and also stimulate our creativity. We can save the number of employees, budget size and fixed expenses. Amazon's 14 leadership principle is the company's core values. Amazon attaches great importance to them, often discussing them in the company and instilling them in new employees.

In departments with more than 50 employees, managers need to constantly optimize their subordinates, that is, they must fire those who perform worst. Therefore, many employees of Amazon always live in fear, and even those employees who have won praise in the assessment sometimes can't believe their eyes.

Some employees think that Amazon's corporate culture is gladiator culture. Many people will leave after staying here for less than two years. Amazon is very strange: it is a startup that strives to become a super-large enterprise, and at the same time it is a big enterprise that strives to maintain the characteristics of a startup. Jenny Dibo said. She worked as a marketing manager in Amazon for five months on 20 1 1, and found that her boss could not accept her idea of using social media to promote quickly, and she had to work in Amazon for a long time every day, which was not conducive to her taking care of her family, so she chose to leave. Amazon's environment is very unfriendly, she said.

Even if you leave Amazon, the process is not that easy. If you jump to a competitor's company to do a similar job, Amazon will send you an email and threaten to take legal action. In 20 10, Faisal Mehsud, who jumped from Amazon to Yi Bei, encountered such a threat. Later, Yi Bei came forward to solve the matter privately.

Details of Amazon's operation: encourage confrontation and competitive culture among employees

People who feel at home in Amazon are often very good at coping with constant friction and conflict and growing up in a confrontational atmosphere. Bezos called people's natural impulse to seek knowledge social cohesion, which he hated. Bezos hopes that his people can argue a result passionately based on the data. This is also included in Amazon's 14 leadership principle:

Amazon operation details: have backbone, dare to express different opinions and have a sense of responsibility.

If a leader disagrees with a decision, he is obliged to question it with respect and ask his own questions, even if he thinks it will be embarrassing or thankless. Leaders should have faith, perseverance and toughness. They should not compromise because of social cohesion. However, when the dust finally settles, they will go all out to take action.

Some people like this opposite culture, and it seems that only in this culture can they work effectively. So many managers returned to this company after leaving Amazon for a while. Everyone knows how difficult it is to work in Amazon, but some people still choose to stay there. Faisal Mesoud, who has worked in Amazon retail for five years, said. You keep learning and the pace of innovation is amazing. No matter what you do, the competition is fierce.

Amazon operation details: how does Amazon's salary incentive work?

The loss of employees does not seem to have caused losses to Amazon. Because the company's share price is rising steadily, Amazon has no difficulty in recruiting talents with this attraction. In the second quarter profit report released in July this year, Amazon said that the number of employees has increased to 97,000, including full-time and part-time employees, an increase of 40% over last year. The basic salary offered by Amazon to new employees belongs to the industry average salary. The signing bonus will be paid within two years, and RSU (the performance stock of China, the company gives you shares, and individuals don't need any capital investment) will be paid for four years. Google and Microsoft's RSU are distributed equally year by year, while Amazon's RSU will be distributed gradually in four years: employees usually get 5% at the end of the first year, 15% at the end of the second year, and then get 20% every six months for the next two years. In this way, Amazon encourages employees to continue to work hard.

Amazon's operational details: Bezos is very concerned about email marketing.

Bezos will not attend some of Amazon's daily meetings. He spends more time on the company's new business, such as AWS cloud computing services, especially Kindle and Kindle Fire (executives joked that in the Kindle building, employees can't even fart without CEO's approval), but Bezos can always brush his presence all over the company.

For example, after the 20 10 lubricant incident, Bezos began to personally care about the company's email marketing activities. He carefully supervised the work of filtering emails, decided which emails could be sent to customers, and tried to look at the marketing email business from a new perspective. By the end of 20 1 1, he felt that he had found a very good new idea.

Bezos likes reading news emails, such as the veryshortlist, which sends various cultural anecdotes online every day, and the cool news tools for technical skills and product evaluation written by kevin kelly, the co-founder of Wired. These two news emails are short and pithy, well written and informative. Bezos believes that Amazon may be able to send a well-designed email every week, which should be a short and pithy digital magazine, rather than a boring marketing letter generated by an algorithm. Therefore, he instructed Shure's vice president of marketing to consider this idea.

From the end of 20 1 1 to the beginning of 20 12, Shure's research team submitted various marketing email versions to Bezos. One of them plays the star card, and the other introduces the interesting history of the product. However, there has been no progress in this project, because the feedback from customers was not very good during the test, and some people who participated in this project still remember the dilemma at that time. At a meeting, Bezos looked at some versions of the sample, and everyone present was waiting silently. There is something wrong with this thing, Bezos said. It bored me. His favorite version focuses on recommending products that have suddenly become popular, such as the mask of V and the CD of Grammy-winning singer Adele. But the title needs to be more eye-catching He told the research group that the copywriter was among them. Some copywriting is badly written. If you are a blogger, you will be hungry.

Finally, his attention turned to Shure. Throughout Amazon's history, the vice president of marketing has always been an easy target to shoot.

Why haven't I seen any progress for three months?

Well, I have to find an editor to make a sample.

Too slow. Do you really care about this?

Yes, we care.

Then remove the design part, it looks too complicated. And this thing has to be accelerated!

Bezos formulated the management principle of Amazon, which enabled the company to survive for 20 years with low profit margin and unfavorable external conditions. In a sense, the whole Amazon is built and developed around his brain. Bezos' brain is like an amplifier, which can spread his wisdom and enterprise to the largest radius possible. Wilk, senior vice president of North American retail at Amazon, said that Bezos is learning by doing. He learns from everyone who has expertise and absorbs the essence into his brain. Now everyone wants to think like Bezos as much as possible.

Amazon's development direction: 2065438+ 1 Beijing time in February 2003. According to foreign media reports, Tom Gutacker, the company's chief financial officer, released a data at Amazon's financial analyst conference this week, showing that the company's future development direction will not be to sell goods, at least not directly.

In response to an analyst's question, Sugutak said that in Amazon's products sold in a fiscal quarter, the proportion of sales from third-party merchants rose from 36% in the same period last year to 39%. In other words, more than one-third of the goods sold by Amazon in a fiscal quarter were not sold by Amazon itself, but by other merchants through Amazon platform.

Sogou Tucker went on to say that Amazon's total merchandise sales increased by 32% in a fiscal quarter, and merchandise sales from third-party merchants increased even more, exceeding 40%.

When shopping on Amazon. Com, a consumer usually looks at the price first, then at the comments of other consumers, then at whether he is qualified to buy the goods he wants, and finally at whether the sellers listed below the goods have the goods. Many consumers do not care about the name of the seller. They think that since they bought it on Amazon's platform, the goods came from Amazon.

This is not a wise move, because the return policy of third-party merchants may be different from Amazon's standard policy. But as Amazon spares no effort to promote its standard policy, this difference seems to be getting smaller and smaller.

It is no secret that Amazon provides Fulfillment of Amazon services for third-party merchants and AWS services for non-digital goods. Amazon uses the same method to transform its existing digital infrastructure into the background of many of the most popular websites on the network.

Although Amazon's implementation allows the smallest enterprises to use Amazon's global scale advantage resources, it also helps to enhance Amazon's advantages. In 20 12, Amazon established 20 new fulfillment centers around the world, and plans to open more fulfillment centers, each with an area exceeding 1 10,000 square feet.

Amazon has invested so much money in the shelves that they are always full. The more goods Amazon sends from third-party merchants through its logistics center, the better, because then it doesn't have to bear the storage cost of the goods themselves.

As the analyst of Baird Equity Research said, the gross profit margin of Amazon's third-party sales business is 100%. In other words, the only cost that Amazon needs to bear is their expenditure on infrastructure, labor, transportation and other aspects needed to support the direct selling business.

Because of these advantages, the third-party sales business will become an important part of Amazon's future business model. In 20 12 years, all service income, including third-party sales service commission, accounted for 15% of Amazon's total sales revenue. If this trend continues, this proportion data will definitely continue to rise.

20 18 1, American securities company Wedbush said in a research briefing that in the past year, Amazon has spent more than $3 billion to produce music and video content. The report also said that Amazon's investment in this area will grow at a rate of 654.38 billion US dollars per year. This may slow down Amazon's future profit growth. [23]

2018165438+10/6, Amazon has launched its own voice assistant Alexa, which has made rapid progress and can even control many cars of Hyundai and Ford. [24]

2065438+June 2008, Amazon's cloud computing business department is developing a translation service for developers, who can use this service to create websites and applications in multiple languages.

Amazon's sales strategy Amazon's marketing activities are fully reflected on its website. Amazon's investment in marketing is also remarkable: for every 1 dollar, Amazon spends 24 cents on marketing and attracting customers, while traditional retail stores only spend 4 cents.

Amazon's marketing strategy mainly includes:

(1) product strategy

Amazon is committed to becoming the most customer-centric company in the world. It has become the online retailer with the largest variety of goods in the world. Amazon and other sellers offer millions of unique new products, refurbished products and second-hand goods, including books, movies, music and games, digital downloads, electronic products and computers, home and gardening products, toys, baby products, groceries, clothing, shoes, jewelry, health and beauty products, sports, outdoor products, tools, automobiles and industrial products.

At the same time, it is easy to see the contents and news of other pages in each page, classify different commodities, and implement different marketing countermeasures and promotion methods for different electronic commodities.

(2) Pricing strategy

Amazon has adopted a discounted price strategy. The so-called discount strategy is that enterprises give certain rebates on the original price of goods in order to stimulate consumers to increase their purchases. It makes up for the discount fee and increases profits by expanding sales. Amazon gave considerable kickbacks to most goods. For example, in music products, promise: you? You will enjoy a daily discount of up to 40% on CDs, including a discount of up to 30% on Amazon? S 100 best-selling CD (60% off CD, including 30% off best-selling CD).

(3) Promotion strategy

There are four common ways to promote sales, that is, the tools for enterprises to communicate with customers and the public. They are advertising, personnel promotion, public relations and business promotion. In Amazon's web page, except for the promotion of personnel, the rest are reflected.

The fun of shopping does not necessarily lie in whether you have enough money to buy the books you want, but in the process of choosing books. Holding a book in hand, looking at the beautiful cover and the introduction is often a great pleasure to buy books. On Amazon's homepage, this kind of fun will not be reduced except that you can't get the book directly. Exquisite multimedia pictures, clear content introduction and book reviews by authoritative people can make people feel immersive.

The advertising position on the home page is also very reasonable, first of all, the best books of the day, then the best seller introduction, books recommended by book friends, books by famous authors and so on. There are not only a large number of multimedia advertisements on Amazon's homepage, but also its advertisements can often be seen on other related network sites. For example, at Yahoo! You can see Amazon's advertisements by searching online for book websites.

Another major feature of advertising is its dynamic real-time performance. The advertising space that changes every day allows customers to learn about publications and the most authoritative comments. Not only do advertisements change every day, but you can also see the news that they change every hour from chec out the Amazon hot 100. Updated every hour.

Amazon does its best to promote its outlets and constantly seeks partners. Because there are many partners and middlemen, the convenience and shopping opportunities for customers to enter their outlets have greatly increased. It even generously promised that as long as you become a partner of Amazon, Amazon will pay 15% introduction fee for books sold at your outlets, regardless of whether it reaches a certain quota.

This is rare in other partnerships. Amazon has many partners, as can be seen from the following paragraph on its website: In fact, five of the six most visited websites are already Amazon partners. Yahoo! And excite are selling products on their websites. Soare AOL com, Geocities, Netscape and dozens of other websites, large and small. We can know: including Yahoo! The five most visited websites, including Excie, have become Amazon's partners.

Amazon has set up a jpgt page to prepare various gifts for adults and children. This is actually a commercial promotion activity of promoting strategy in value activities. It attracts customers to buy our products for a long time by providing shopping vouchers or exquisite small gifts to customers of all ages. In addition, Amazon also gives discounts to customers who buy its products for a long time, which is also a commercial promotion measure.

Amazon's special gift page provides small gifts for online shopping customers (including adults and children), which belongs to both commercial promotion activities and public relations activities; But also do a good job in information communication between enterprises and the public. It listens to and collects the reactions of all kinds of public and related middlemen to enterprises and their goods and services, provides them with information about enterprises and their internal employees, and often exchanges information; The company also provides a page for customers who visit this website for the first time, providing customers with instructions on various online usage methods to help customers get familiar with it as soon as possible, which is also a way to do a good job in public relations.

(4) Amazon often exempts some customers from the freight when they are on campus or have a certain order quantity.

(5) Amazon China has its own distribution center, which supports various payment methods. As the leader of e-commerce in China, Amazon China provides consumers with 32 categories and tens of millions of commodities such as books, music, movies, digital mobile phones, household appliances, toys, health, beauty cosmetics, watches, jewelry, clothing bags, shoes and boots, sports, food, mother and baby, sports, outdoor leisure and IT software. , through door-to-door service and cash on delivery, for China consumers.

20 12, 18 On June 8, according to foreign media reports, Forbes columnists Scott Rennie and Michael Cohen published an in-depth review article, in which they said that the rise of cloud computing technology will greatly change the user demand and market structure in the enterprise software field. While some traditional software giants such as Cisco, IBM and Oracle Bone Inscriptions are studying this market, big companies such as Microsoft and Google have invested heavily and started to compete for the market dominance.

201212 In February, Chris Cardinal, managing partner of Synapse Studios, a Web development company, discovered a vulnerability, which obviously hurt Amazon more than its users. As of Monday, Amazon's media relations department did not respond to this. Cardinal, who reported this in HTMList, said that his experience proves that Amazon needs to improve its security. Obviously, Amazon has not substantially improved its authentication protocol.

(4) Promotion means

Open source and reduce expenditure: As mentioned above, the secret of Amazon's profit lies in the large purchase discounts and free delivery services provided to customers. However, this promotion strategy is also a double-edged sword: it increases sales and also generates huge costs. How to digest the resulting costs? Amazon's approach is to spare no effort to cut costs in financial management: reduce expenses, lay off employees, use advanced and convenient order processing systems to reduce error rates, integrate delivery, and save inventory costs. By reducing the logistics cost, it is equivalent to getting more sales revenue with less promotion cost and then giving it back to consumers, thus winning more customers and forming an effective virtuous circle. Of course, this puts high demands on Amazon's cost control ability and logistics system.

In addition, while cutting costs, Amazon is also actively looking for new profit growth points, such as selling old and new goods for other businesses online, and cooperating with many businesses to sell its brand products to Amazon customers and collect commissions from them. Amazon's customers can buy brands, commodities, original books, music products and other products of many merchants in one stop, which not only provides customers with more commodities, but also attracts many consumers to shop with its diversified choices and product information, and at the same time does not increase additional inventory risks, which can be described as killing two birds with one stone. These effective measures to increase revenue and reduce expenditure are an important guarantee for the success of Amazon's low-price promotion.