Amazon

Based on what you have learned from reading the Amazon case, what is Amazon's primary value discipline? Does Amazon excel in more than one value discipline? Please explain.

Amazon is both operationally excellent and customer-intimate. They sell a wide variety of products at low prices which are delivered fast and reliably to consumers. Amazon uses personalized services and target marketing in communicating to their customers.

Amazon is a cost leader. Their competent distribution network allows them to offer a wide variety of products and at the same time keep their inventories under control. In fact, when they built their own distribution centers, they managed to impressively improve their inventory turnover from 9 to 16. Their own fulfillment centers greatly improved the reliability of delivery of customer orders which was a great concern for customers in the past. Their free shipping cost program gave them significant advantage over brick and mortar stores because it enabled customers to enjoy the convenience of buying online (especially when using their 1 click ordering system) without having to worry about paying for shipping costs.

Amazon exemplified customer intimacy by taking advantage of information technology to gather shopping behavior of their customers such that they are able to make personalized recommendations based on customers’ past purchases or simply based on the search input on their website. It makes it very easy for customers to find what they want/need when recommendations are right at their fingertips. Their launch of the ebook reader - Kindle gave customers a complete solution – a device that can hold thousands of books that can be purchased anytime, anywhere just by a click of a button. Their smart app that compares prices with Amazon is an important and useful tool to price-sensitive customers. They help customers find products at the lowest price.

I believe that Amazon excelled in these two value disciplines. They...