Amazon's International Expansion Strategies

Marketing Management 1 | P a g e
Marketing Management

Marketing Management 2 | P a g e
Amazon is a giant player of e-commerce industry founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos. He is the
current CEO of the organization and with his unique style of thinking and leadership style; he
has marked its position in the list of top thirty richest men worldwide. Jeff Bezos once dreamt for
selling everything on internet and he started the journey of making his dream true by selling
books over internet from a garage in his home. At that time, Amazon was known as the Cadabra
Inc. but later on in 1995, the name of the company was changed as Amazon and since then, it is
operating in more than 188 countries with more than 12 registered offices in different countries.
Today, the company is known as the largest internet retailer in the world in terms of market
capitalisation and revenue but in terms of sales, organization stands on the second position as the
leading position is acquired by Alibaba Group, a giant internet retailer of China. Apart from the
internet, organization entered acquired Whole Foods Market for $13.4 billion in 2017 and this
led the company to enhance its market presence as brick and mortar retailer. Amazon stands on
the third place as the most valuable company in the United States just after Apple and Microsoft
and at the speed, organization is expanding its functionalities, soon, Amazon will acquire the
leading position in terms of most valuable company in the US as well as in the worldwide market
(Twentify, 2018).
Amazon started its operations from the biggest economy of the world i.e. United States as an
internet retailer. Today, organization is the largest American e-commerce and cloud computing
company based in the Seattle, Washington. Company has established separate retail websites for
United States, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Turkey, Singapore, Japan, China, India, Italy,
Germany, etc. Apart from this, organization also offers international shopping for some countries
for some of their products.
In the global marketplace, Amazon has developed its significant position by continuously
upgrading their products and services to meet their customers’ demands and wants. Apart from
this, organization always believed that innovation and creativity are two major concepts for the
attainment of sustainable growth and overall development. With the help of innovation and
creativity, organization could evolve their existing product range as well as to provide their
customers unique and attractive options to fulfil their needs. This has helped the organization to
retain their customers’ interest within the organization along with developing positive image of
the organization in the customers’ mind-sets (Camhi & Pandolph, 2017).

Marketing Management 3 | P a g e
Amazon’s vision is to “be the earth’s most customer centric company” and with regards to this
vision, organization has made their strategies aligned with the vision. Along with this,
organization has adopted several measures in order to make their employees’ efforts coordinated
with the organizational vision of fulfilment of customers’ needs and wants. Additionally,
organizational customer centric approach is the most effective approach through which they have
been able to develop positive relations with their customers along with making the organization
sufficient enough to stand on the leading position in the e-commerce industry. With regards to
this, organization has implemented sundry quality checks for the objective of determining the
quality of the products to fulfil customers’ needs and wants.
Amazon’s primary strategy for moving towards global marketplace is GLOCAL. This strategy
states “go global and think local”. With regards to this strategy, organization has been able to
establish its brand image in the global e-commerce industry. Apart from the e-commerce
industry, organization has expanded its operations to various other industries like cloud
computing, consumer electronic industry, online entertainment, web services, and other
merchandise. Along with this, organization has adopted multi-level sales strategy in order to
manage the functionalities in e-commerce industry (Rayapura, 2018).
With regards to the, multi-level sales strategy, organization have started focusing on business-
consumer relationships between organization and the customers and relationship between
business-to-business and suppliers with the objective of satisfying customers’ needs and wants.
Apart from these strategies, organization regularly updates their strategies and policies through
which product and service offering of the organization could be extended along with making it as
per the target audiences’ demands and wants. Along with their e-commerce platform,
organization owns a publishing arm, Amazon publishing (a film and television studio) (Deresky,
2017). Primary functionalities of this studio are to produce consumer electronics like Kindle e-
readers, Fire TV, Fire Tablets as well as the Echo devices. Along with this, organization also
owns one of the largest cloud infrastructure services (IaaS and PaaS) providing company i.e.
Amazon Web Services, a subsidiary of Amazon. Apart from this, organization also sells certain
low-end products under its own brand Amazon basics and this brand is their in-house production
(Panhans & Kaufmann, 2018).