Google is the top ranked internet search engine, followed by YouTube. Do you know who is in third place? Amazon. Also relevant to marketers seeking to use Amazon for influence is that, Amazon is the Number one search engine when looking for products and services. This is because almost half of the searches for products and services start with Amazon. In other words Amazon searches do so with their credit card in their hands.
Amazon is the king of ecommerce websites. Social-media butterflies use Facebook to engage with friends. Internet users search Google for answers to questions. Online shoppers go to Amazon to do one thing: buy.
Given that $100 billion in expected annual sales, Amazon is the king of online markets. It has built-in trust, its buyers’ payment information is already saved and members receive a choice of shipping on all orders. So Amazon is the Gorilla of choice and can’t be beaten when it comes to choosing an eCommerce platform to sell on.
When Amazon launched the world saw a website selling books and assumed that Amazon was, and always would be, an online bookshop.
It’s Founder Mr Bezos, as it turns out, had bigger plans.
Books were a good way into online retailing: once people learned to buy books online they would buy more and more other things. The Amazon website has been able to capture much more data about what visitors looked at and thus might want than any normal shop; better still if shoppers reviewed things, then that would serve to enrich the experience for other shoppers. Mr Bezos created a virtuous circle whereby low prices pulled in customers and merchants, which boosted volumes, which led to ever lower prices—a “flywheel” that would generate growth for as long as the company put the interests of the customers first.
On top of its online-retail success, Amazon has produced two other trans formative businesses. The Kindle e-reader pioneered the shift from paper books to electronic ones, creating a market that now accounts for more than a tenth of spending on books and which Amazon dominates. Less visible but just as trans formative is Amazon’s invention of cloud-computing as a pay-as-you-go service, now a $9 billion market. That venture, called Amazon Web Services (AWS), has slashed the technology costs of starting an enterprise or running an existing one.
Mr Bezos has always insisted that Amazon will continue to be “customer-focused” rather than “competitor-focused”. As Million Dollar Influencers this is exactly the same type of focus that we have, so learning how to work with Amazon and working out how to use Amazon for influence can only help you spread your message.
