Why the Kindle Fire Isn't the Only Reason You Should Be Watching Amazon.com
by Brent LearyI’ve been playing with my new Kindle Fire for the last few weeks, and I have to say it’s a nice little device. The display is nice and crisp. Video streaming from Amazon works great, and you do get the feeling that it optimized the device for streaming content from its servers. That’s really important since it only has a 6.54G hard drive. Netflix streaming is good; battery life seems about on par with other tablet devices I own; and the sound quality is excellent.
But I’m not writing this to do an in-depth review of Kindle Fire. I’m writing this because year in and year out, Amazon does things that impact customer experiences and business models. And while so much of our collective business focus is on Google, Facebook and Apple — which is totally understandable — Amazon is the most fascinating company to watch for me, from a small business perspective. I expect that to be the case in 2012 as well. Below are a few reasons why you may also want to watch.
Fulfillment By Amazon
Amazon.com perfected the art of distribution and logistics, and turned fulfillment into competitive advantage. It used the transactional and behavior data from the things we bought and the products we looked at to recommend similar things in order to sell us more stuff more efficiently. And by applying extreme analysis, business intelligence tools and best practices, it combined its logistical expertise with its customer knowledge and created Amazon Prime. Then, as done in the past, after perfecting their distribution engine it made a service called Fulfillment By Amazon available to small businesses. FBA is one of the most advanced fulfillment networks available, allowing your business to leverage Amazon’s distribution engine. With FBA, you can store your products in Amazon’s fulfillment centers, and they will directly pack, ship and provide customer service for those products. And the pricing for this is very affordable, while allowing you to have access to a nice set of services. It also allows you to sell products under the Amazon Prime umbrella.
Amazon Prime
I’ve been an Amazon Prime member since the beginning, because paying $79 a year to get free two-day shipping on anything I buy (even computers, televisions and other sizeable items) seemed too good to be true. Apparently I wasn’t alone in this thinking as millions of people jumped on board. So, Amazon turned sporadic purchases into a membership program that — at least in my case — led to more buying than would have occurred without it. To me this was a stroke of genius, and one of the early examples of the power of the Subscription Economy. If the free shipping wasn’t enough, Amazon recently included in the membership free access to its video streaming service, and now you can borrow eBooks from the huge selection.
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[Pick up the February 2012 issue for the full article]
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