Discuss the Importance of Changes in the External Environment to an Organization like Walmart

2. How does Amazon.com compete on the web?

Amazon.com can not be the great on-line bookstore if it lacks of good founders as well as its core competence. The founder, Bezos , is a creative and dynamic man who can keep pace with the dynamic world. The company also pays much attention to its customers, suppliers and base on technology. It has an attempt to manage and build itself to be better, easier, faster and cheaper in order to compete in the world so this became its core value to compete on the web. These are categorized in four propositions.

1. Convenience:

Because Amazon.com is an on-line bookstore, anyone interesting or customers who live anywhere can contact with the company by only done through its webpage or email and the firm is open for business twenty-four hours a day. Everyone can search, buy and pay for the product via the internet, and then books are delivered to you in shortly, like a one-stop service.

One of the company success is it understands consumer buying behavior.

In the technology world, customer behavior can change all the time. They want more comfort and convenience and Amazon can provide this for them. When the consumer wants to purchase product, they can search for information through its website or by email. Then when they decide to purchase, they can buy by search for a specific book, topic or author or they can browse their way through the book catalog feature. Then they can browse, fill up a virtual sopping basket and entering their credit card information or by placing their order on line and then phoning in their credit card information, customers' order are processed immediately and book in stock are packed and mailed the same day. The sale process does not take much time and customers instead of going outside to buy books, they can only buy via internet elsewhere.

2. Price and discount:

All books are discounted. Bestsellers books are sold at 30 percent discount and other books at a 10 percent discount. Discount that Amazon provide to customers come from company have low cost due to there are no bookshelves to browse unlike traditional bookstores and no salespeople.

In addition, the firm's small warehouse is used only to stock bestsellers and consolidate and repack customer orders. Moreover, it has high turnover inventory so the firm has low inventory and capital investment cost. Finally, the firm can sell their product cheaper than others.

3. Service:

Firm offers many things which help firm to compete with competitors on the

web. Because the information on the web can spread out rapidly then customers can get the information or news quickly. Therefore, Amazon needs to focus on service that provides to customer.

The first, customers can browses fill up a virtual shopping basket and then complete the sale by entering their credit card information or by placing their order on-line and then phoning in their credit card information.

Second, firm offers two forms of e-mail-based service to its registered customers. Customers can register their interests in a particular author or topic. And registered customers are notified each time a new book by their favourite author or topic is published. Also, editor's service provides editorial comments about featured books via e-mail

The next, firm offers space for readers to post their own reviews and then

steps out of the way and let's its customers sell to each other. Furthermore, Amazon associate with some other website approximate 7,000 sites that link from their web page to Amazon's catalog page for the book.

In addition, Amazon.com competes with others by providing such as movie ShowTime, yellow pages, corporate accounts, your Amazon home, in-store pickup and travel to their registered customers.

The last, people who buy product from Amazon.com can trust and confident in reliable of service.

4. Selection

By reason of Amazon.com uses the associates program so the firm can

provides wide variety of the books which people will not find in bookstores or library. Moreover, firm also provides other products for example music, DVD, electronics and office, kids and baby, home and garden, sports and fitness, gifts and registries and etc. so it makes Amazon.com becomes the one-stop shopping.

3. Compare Amazon.com with a traditional bookstore?

Amazon.com has many factors that split out from a traditional bookstore, when we compare between them. There are several factors as following:

* The nature of business of Amazon.com is the book seller on the internet website while the traditional bookstore is selling book on the shelves.

* Customers can only see the books in the monitor, it is not physical touching as the bookstore.

* Convenience and shorter time to search for the books, just type the book name, author name, or other subject categories. In contrary, bookstore take longer time and not easy to find the book.

* More than 1.1 million books available in catalog compare to bookstore have the limit display space.

* Amazon.com opens 24hours a day and worldwide while the bookstore only opens in business hour or limited opening hour and hardly to be worldwide.

* The price is cheaper and discount for some books due to the less operating cost and large order.

* Amazon.com provides the rating and recommendation for the books, customers know from the rating which books are most favorite and interesting to read. The rating comes from all readers and recommendation. Contrary to bookstore does not have rating for the books because people do not just come back to tell the recommendation.

* On the other hand, in a bookstore the client can have the book immediately, if available. At Amazon.com is necessary to wait the parcel arriving. Usually only bestsellers are in stock and send in the same day. Other books take one or more week to arrival.

* Payment on the credit card and Paypal in the internet but in the bookstore is paid in cash and credit card.

4. Do a SWOT analysis for Amazon.com

SWOT