Report on Amazon Case Study

Report on the Case Study --- Amazon.com This paper will summarize the main points of the presentation about Amazon.com in the first part including brief introduction, PESTEL analysis and Porter’s five forces; and raise critical analyses in the second part mainly focus on Amazon’s competing groups and its superiority. Summary of presentation Amazon.com is the world’s largest ecommerce retailer founded by Jeff Bezos. The site formally opened to the world in 1995(Quittner). It has separated retail websites for countries like United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, Spain, Italy, France, Japan and China; and its product lines include books, music, DVD, MP3 downloads, electronics and computing, software, home and garden, toys and games, baby, DIY and tools, health and beauty, shoes and accessories, etc., (Amazon.com). In 2010, Amazon.com made more than 10% of online retail sales in North America (Watson, 2011); and in 2012 in the UK, it received top customer satisfaction marks (Deatsch, 2012). PESTEL framework is used to analyze external environment and the issues facing Amazon. Firstly, politics highlights the role of governments. Actually, government policies could be considered as a double-edged sword. For Amazon, it has been benefitted from the UK government’s e-commerce promoting policy on one hand (BBC News, 1999), and its prices and span were affected by Massachusetts State government’s online sales tax policy on the other hand (Cohan, 2012). Secondly, economic reasons mainly refer to macro-economic factors such as GDP rates. In a high GDP environment, people work hard and spend hard; on the contrary, people spend less in low GDP environment. In a high GDP environment, people want books they will buy; in a low GDP environment, people check books out of libraries (Gertner, 2010). Although it is not a particular rule for Amazon, undoubtedly, GDP rates do affect Amazon’s sales. Thirdly, social influences usually indicate