Every enterprise and every business exist to attain its goal, both social and business goals. Information system is crucial for the continued existence of any business. Amazon is one of the major E- commerce worldwide with the large number of its customers. Amazon uses information systems in its business processes to gain more advantage through their customer's personal information. Therefore, this report is about how organizations like Amazon use information system as a gadget to obtain its ambitions. The role of enterprise resource networks system is extremely critical for these types of businesses to collect data. E-commerce organizations have strong relationships with their customers.
Organization Overview
Amazon has grown itself as a giant of E-commerce in the world. It was founded by Jeff Bezos in Bellevue, Washington in 1994. The company started as the marketplace for online books, but Jeff Bezos believed Amazon is not just an online book seller and expanded overtime selling electronics, video games software, housewares. Simply Amazon now is marketplace for everything from the expensive software to the zip for pants. Amazon managed to grow its revenue from $15.7 million in 1996 to $148 million in 1997, followed by $610 million in 1998 making Jeff Time magazine’s 1999 Person of the year in 1999 (Hall 2017). Since then Amazon has been growing popularity, its services, and profits in a Sky-rocketing way.
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Amazon today provides delivery service for its goods in most part of the world. One can compare prices and products easily and get it straight to the door. The plus point of Amazon is one can also sell their stuffs. Amazon Web Services is a largest Web service provider in the world. It also provides the streaming of selected movies and TV programs through Amazon Prime. Amazon have got it is branched all over the globe today marking its success and able to prove itself as the people’s favorite.
Business Model
Business Model is the backbone for any system to keep its existence. It shows business about its revenues over a time. It will help the organization to propose a financing for future. The business model of Amazon was to sell the books at initial stage which later developed to sell everything and over a time it has developed its subbranches and started providing web services and stepped into an entertainment industry too.
Today Business Model of Amazon is not like what it seems to be. The truth is amazon does not make any profit from the goods that they sell from their website actually report have shown that amazon makes a loss by selling the products and delivering them to the people. The true revenue they gain is from its subsidies. Amazon Web Services offers affordable plan for other business to host their website. AWS services though cover all the losses the company has been bearing. In 2017 AWS made $17.5 Billion making profit of $4.3 Billion covering the loss of $200 million of its marketplace.
Amazon also stepped into the entertainment business through Amazon Prime Subscription which provides different plans and schemes generating revenue for the company. Moreover, Amazon also earns companies like IMBD, audible, Zappos.com, twitch and Whole foods which worth a lot in a market.
Website
Amazon Website Content
It is a very vast topic to discuss about the amazon content as it provides the services from agricultural equipment’s to the highly developed technological firms. Before going into detail for the content we will take few major categories and strategies of amazon website content. First, amazon is preferring more to the user experience over the business by following the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) which basis on ecommerce. According to this model, major determinants are the perceived usefulness and the perceived ease of use, which contributes the user behavior experience and proves to be actual system use (Chen & R., 2005).
This is the reason that amazon started all its services in eight languages, more than sixty currencies of different countries and provides the tracking number from the confirmation of the order to the delivery of the product to the customers. In short, amazon gives the values to the customers which is hunger of every human being. This is the only reason that amazon extended its operation and added the kitchen and cooking products for the cooking lovers, games accessories and movies for the enjoyment in leisure time. Home decor and IT gadgets were added for the sake of demand from many communities, even though Amazon started the drop shipping when people got busy and couldn’t find the enough time to buy the value le gifts for the family members and friends. To meet the demands of the customers amazon upgraded its interface and content for the purpose of development but has to tackle with many issues during this process for the time being but it achieved the central position in the skeleton of ecommerce.
Hardware
A big organization as amazon must be smart and careful while building their hardware infrastructure, they must investigate each aspect of it like price and quality. Amazon buy its components from Commodity (cheap manufactures as compare to Branded competitors) and by anyhow they are not able to provide a component which amazon desire, Amazon become ferocious negotiator. Question arise that being a one of the top organizations why amazon does not buy Premium-priced equipment as their components are more durable comparing to Commodity parts. Amazon operates at massive scale, around 500,000 servers are being used in web services it does not matter at that level of usage from where the equipment is emerging. As said by Golden (2013) “at a very large scale, even highly reliable individual components still result in an unreliable overall infrastructure because of the failure of components, as rare as the failure of a specific piece of equipment may be”. Amazon operation also affect some other aspects of its hardware infrastructure, data centers also contain generators and batteries for that specific component amazon uses custom-designed equipment.
Software
Amazon launched with only one instance and operating system Amazon Linux but with the time as it expands now amazon provide more than 30 instance and 10 operating system but Linux remain the core technology. Services provide by amazon are S3 for storage and EC2 for computer service. EC2 been used for everything from media and web hosting to development and test environment. Amazon Linux is its own version of operating system; Amazon have been enhancing Amazon Linux owing to the requirement of customer. Amazon assures that its Linux is the most optimized version of Linux to use within the EC2. Amazon divided team to work on machine learning and the development of Linux Kernel, Xen, and Amazon Linux. Anyhow amazon find a bug within the Linux instantly they send a patch upstream. Its less demanding for amazon to ingest such fixes with the release of other Linux Kernel than having to preserve our claim fix sets with bug fixes.
Security Issues
Security issues have a huge effect on the growth on ecommerce platforms like any website. Many well-known organizations are being trapped by the hackers with different types of attacked. Hackers play different tricks to get the platforms into trap. They mostly use a ransom ware and steal the sensitive data from the organization and misuse it, these data can be names. date of births and credit card details of the customers. Similarly, Amazon.com fell prey to a such cyber-attack in in 2010. In which the hijackers used Cross site scripting (XSS) to gain the credential of amazon. Afterwards they managed to get the access to the backend of amazon and the database management system in of Amazon.com. That was the critical time for Amazon because the hijackers were able to capture the login details fir anybody who was trying to login into any web page on amazon. Those hackers did not merely stop there, they used a trojan horse known as ZEUS to infect the servers and machines of amazon and even computers began reporting to for updates and instruction. After struggling from this time amazon started to increase its security and add the multi factor authentication in their system (Mosca, P. et all).
Payment and Transaction Process
In this technocracy era, technology has been so advanced and developed that instant result may be achieved. Amazon is one of the proverbial online marketplaces and the best example of E-commerce as it provides numerous ways of making payments or processing transactions along with best customer service. There are some of the methods used by the Amazon for making payments such as:
- Amazon ZIP pay. It is known as ‘pay at you pace with zip’ as user need to make a zip account and link it to Amazon. Basically, in this money is deducted from your zip account and user is liable to pay back to zip account instead of amazon as the terms of their account. Zip pay has two units: Zip Money and Zip Pay. Zip money is just a credit up to $3000 with an interest but free period of six months however, Zip Pay is credit up to $1500 which is always interest free.
- Amazon gift cards. Amazon gift cards are issued by the Amazon in which the user can redeem that card on any purchase or can save that amount for future use on any other item.
- Amazon pay or Amazon Pay Code. Amazon Pay is an online way of making transaction with the Amazon and with the other third party or e-commerce sites whereas Amazon Pay Code is a technique of making payment in cash via western union or other agents. It is a convenient way as the customer needs to order first and then make the payment in cash through respective agent. The order will be shipped to the customer within the mentioned time (Billing and payment fundamentals FAQs Payment options.
- CBA (checkout by Amazon). It a method in which the normal checkout of a consumer is secured by the Amazon’s security servers in which consumers can choose their shipping methods but they need to enter the details of their credit card on the Amazon site.
- Pay by invoice. It is a suitable way for the business customer to pay for the goods and services which was purchased on credit before.
- Amazon Prime Store Card. It is a card provided by the Synchrony Bank which is helpful for the users who often shop online. It is an Amazon Prime Store Card i.e. can be used on the Amazon purchases only as this card provide 5% back on all purchases which is significantly advantageous for the customers.
- Credit cards and debit cards. Credit cards, debit cards and other cards like master card, visa card, American express so on and so forth are accepted by Amazon. Debit card can be used for Amazon Prime as well. All the transactions are monitored and verified under the surveillance of advanced security servers.
- Linked bank accounts. It is basically a checking account that can be used instead of a credit card but there are some restrictions on purchasing some products or services through checking cards.
- PayPal. Although PayPal is one of the easiest ways of making transactions, yet Amazon does not accept the direct payments from PayPal i.e. there are some sidestep that allows the user to pay through PayPal on Amazon. Generally, PayPal requires two step authentication which is very time consuming. Moreover, PayPal is basically having a strong connection with eBay and unintentionally PayPal affects the Amazon payment system of Amazon Pay. That is the reason that Amazon does not accept direct payment from PayPal (Bhandary, B. (2019)).
These are the different techniques for making or processing transactions by Amazon which is more secure and confidential as SSL (Security Sockets Layer) technology is used by the Amazon for the authorization of e-transactions to keep it more safe and secure. To secure the transactions on Amazon, the server always asks for a two-step verification of every transaction which is further protected by the topmost secure technology i.e. SSL or TSL (Secure Socket Layer and Transport Security Layer). Nowadays, the Amazon system is so advanced and developed as there is appropriate scrutinizing of confidentiality and authentication of every activities to make that system free from cybercrimes and other fraudulent activities or unauthorized access. Proper encryption, digital signatures, message authentication codes (MAC), SSL and TSL secure servers are the functions and techniques used by the Amazon to maintain the privacy and the trust or satisfaction of the customers.
Recommendations
As per the SWOT analysis and overview of Amazon, we would like to recommend that for more expansion and development of Amazon in the global market, Amazon should try to overcome its weaknesses i.e. limited or insubstantial discernment in today’s global market which ultimately be a great hindrance in economic growth rates of market on the way of its establishment. Although, Amazon is a proverbial e-commerce marketplace, yet its workforce needs to work on its business model or to make some unique changes. In this technosavy and competitive era, it is extremely easy for the other competitive markets to resemble them or to adopt their strategies or business model for their own benefits. Furthermore, pricing sometimes considered as an obstacle in the advancement of the company due to the rivalry or oppositions which significantly lead to pricing battle. In addition, changes should be made on the website too; to make it more alluring and uncomplicated for the users. International delivery of products should be efficient and effective so that it will eventually attract even more consumers which is worthwhile and productive for the company to maintain its prestigious positive in this marketplace.
Conclusion
To conclude, this report evaluates present scenario of Amazon through the information system. It is proved from this report that there is a large scope for Amazon to expand its business through enterprise resource planning. Moreover, Amazon is a free from cybercrimes or fraudulent activities. Its proper privacy, proper payment method and great quality products helps in the satisfaction of the customers and to expand the business. All in all, Amazon is now the worldwide famous and most preferred company by the customers.
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