How Amazon Became the Everything Store

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Operations Management and Decision Making Modela
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1. Amazon began as an online book retailer. How has it grown to be known as the
"everything store"?
The history of Amazon is perhaps one of the most iconic one. The company was
established in 1994 by Jeff Bezos as an online book retailer. Since then, Amazon has grown to
unprecedented heights becoming the largest e-commerce and cloud computing company in the
world with a market value of over 400 Billion US dollars and more than 260,000 employees all
around the globe.
Amazon foundation started in bookselling in the e-commerce platform. The idea of
focusing primarily on books was to build capability and competency before venturing into other
products (McGurl, 2016, pp.450). The focusing on books was the right decision by Amazon
since books have a universal appeal and are easy to ship. The success of the books business gave
Amazon the experience, capability and customer understanding to grow its online platform.
Amazon redefined its business operations from bookselling and ventured into selling
movies, music, toys, and electronics. It further mastered its complex distribution network and
further expanded into clothes, jewelry and apparel, sporting goods, software, and automotive
parts. Just after Amazon had established itself as the top retailer in the online platform, the
founder Jeff Bezos established versatile technology that featured into cloud computing platform
that is known as Amazon Web services (Ritala, Golnam and Wegmann, 2014, pp.240).
Additionally, Amazon ventured into incremental innovation and added a host of new other
services such as prime pantry, subscribe and save, prime now, Amazon Fresh, Amazon Go, and
prime music. One of its radical innovation was the introduction of Amazon echo and Alexa,
which are hardware for digital voice assistance and natural language processing.

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In early 1994 before the onsets of online platforms, Bezos realized the importance of
digital commerce in changing global business. Bezos saw the need for investing in logistics in
order to monetize this emerging gap (Bhatt, et al., 2015, pp.5107). This led to Amazon focusing
more on growth and expansion at the expense of profit. Bezos reinvested huge chunks of the
revenue in building an empire that touched in whole different aspects of human lives (Zhu and
Liu, 2018, pp.2620). The company continually pump cash into innovative programs such as
Alexa, Amazon prime services and Amazon web services. Additionally Amazon has ventured
into many countries in the world, acquired Whole food, introduce Kindle reading device,
launched a website for selling art, produced tablet computers, and invested in production of TV
shows and much more (Zhu and Liu, 2018, pp.2620). This supports Amazon as an “everything
store.” The Amazon web service has also handled computer infrastructures for many company
and institutions. There is no limit to the growth of Amazon.
Amazon can be described as a conglomerate of companies that are held together by
extraordinary leadership. This is because Amazon combines different aspects of the supply chain
in its business be it consumer retail products, entertainment, cloud computing, data science,
healthcare, and even robotics. In relation to supply chain management, I think Jeff Bezos has
extraordinary insight in term of the growth of the company. It would have been easier for
Amazon management to relax and enjoy the profit of their business and the competitive
advantage. However under the leadership of Jeff Bezos, Amazon shift focus into the provision of
robust and technical support to other companies. This later proved to be a smart move by the
emergence of the smartphone frenzy consequently increasing the demand for server space from
app developers. Amazon had established itself among other tech giants such as Microsoft and
Google. Amazon business model may appear to be disconnected and arbitrary but the operation

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of the company complement each other. For example, the company provision of hardware such
as tablets, computer, and accessories, and kindles, augment its delivery services. Amazon has
established itself in the global fintech industry, consequently lowering the barricades to entry for
fintech startups.
2. What aspects of Amazon's operations management are based on the increased
globalization of world trade?
Amazon continues to attract new customers to its giant e-commerce platform with the
introduction of new product and services. Amazon seeks to continually expand into the global
markets and is more interested in expansion and growth as opposed to making huge profits (Liu
and Papageorgiou, 2013, pp.370). Amazon global strategy is to reach far and wide into different
nations and states of the world. Among the aspects that Amazon focuses on its operation to fulfill
globalization include the following.
Amazon has launched a new feature known as international shopping feature. This
feature will enable the consumers to get an array of products shipped to them at any part of the
world from the United States (Kantor and Streitfeld, 2015, pp.75). The feature has been
developed to encourage consumers to purchase product outside of their home market. Currently,
the feature is available in English, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Chinese and Brazilian.
Additionally, to enhance globalization, consumers will be able to shop in different
currencies. The international feature currently enables customers to shop using 25 different
currencies and plans are underway to increase more currencies and language options. The feature
will also show the cost for shipping, pricing, and import tax for each product purchased.