Products & Services and the Corresponding Market Interface

Products & Services and the corresponding Market Interface

The business model of Amazon in its early years in 1998 consisted of a very different value proposition is you compare it with today's offerings by the company. To clarify the value proposition you have to view it in relation to the "value recipient" (inspired by Anders Sundelin. . Amazon in 1998 addressed consumers by selling products and retailers by offering a marketplace where they can sell their products as well (Kotha, 1998). Today this target-group is still up-to-date. Retailers today can use much more offerings to sell their products over the Amazon infrastructure. Thus Amazon still addresses retailers, but additionally the bigger ones, which develop their own shops and do not "only" sell products on the marketplace. By opening its infrastructure, Amazon is now able to serve retailers with much more customization and integration opportunities. The latest "high-end-product" in this area is the WebStore, where retailers can build their own store utilizing components of the Amazon infrastructure. As a side effect they not only address developers designing retail-applications anymore, but also the ones which use the infrastructure for other business or private matters. Figure 1 and 2 show an example for a pattern of products and services and the corresponding target-group matching.

* buying and selling end-consumers - Amazon addresses supermarket-shoppers and market-place visitors as we know them already from real life. In this case the customers are more or less well-known to Amazon, e.g. through surveys and new scientific findings by doing eye-tracing for websites. At the beginning in 1998 they addressed the book-readers, later the goal was to address every end-consumer. Since 2002 Amazon provides the marketplace-platform where everybody can sell his (new or used) stuff. This is crucial to the product and pricing-strategy as it enables Amazon to offer more products (by 3rd parties) and lower...