The successful story of Amazon.com

E-commerce, also known as electronic commerce, where by utilizing the Internet, has become a very powerful tool in modern business trading.

One of the very successful e-commerce examples is Amazon, which is an American electronic commerce company in Seattle, Washington. Amazon is the largest bookstore in the world. According to the industry experts, Amazon is well positioned to maintain a firm grip on its title as the undisputed e-commerce leader.


The founder of Amazon, Jeffrey Bezos, had the mindset of creating an online bookstore because of his eager inspiration to search for the perfect Web business.

Why is Amazon so successful?

Jeffrey Bezos knew where to get the venture capital. He is a smart person that he got an early start on his strategy for Amazon and disbursed whatever it took to build up the business and its name. Jeff Bezos spent heavily on advertising to establish his new venture. Amazon has banners to appear on at least 28,000 other sites on the Internet to attract those customers to just order books using a computer instead of actually going to a bookstore. For instance, if a person is browsing on a search engine for a particular subject, when the search brings up a menu of selections, it will also bring up the Amazon banner that says, “for books about (whatever) go to amazon.com.” Thus, as expected, the business took off more quickly than anyone had predicted.

Furthermore, open source is also another main player of the successful Amazon story. Linux on commodity hardware has permitted Amazon to reduce its costs since it launched. Besides, Amazon is laos a heavy user of Perl, MySQL, and Mason. At the same time, Amazon has also presented a key challenge to many parts of the open source story. The licenses compelled Amazon to not release its source as its software is never distributed although it has its own open source software.

Nevertheless, Amazon has created its own "architecture of participation," that is perhaps even richer than that of many open source software development communities. Amazon has built a lot of contributors that numbers in the millions. Everyone who rates books, creates Listmania Lists, or just buys the books and contributes to the sales-rank calculations, helps to build the Amazon interface. Even though Amazon has closed codes, another robust architecture for participating in the data layer of the interface has existed.

Amazon found out that there is an incongruity between its closed code and the benefits it received from the open source software, and that leads the leader rethink about how to redress the balance.