What technology does Amazon Use?

Amazon.com offers products varying from motion pictures and books to cosmetics and pet products– and everything in between. In 1995, Amazon.com sold its first book, which shipped from Jeff Bezos’ garage in Seattle. In 2006, Amazon.com sold a lot more than books and had sites serving seven countries, with 21 fulfillment centers around the world amounting to more than 9 million square feet of storage facility area. The story is an e-commerce dream, and Jeff Bezos was Time magazine’s Person of the Year in 1999. The innovation and company savvy that sustains Amazon.com is famous and, at times, questionable: The business owns many patents on e-commerce procedures that some argue should remain in the public domain. In this short article, we’ll discover what Amazon does, what makes it different from other e-commerce websites, and how its innovation infrastructure supports its multi-pronged approach to online sales. Amazon.com offers lots and lots of things. The direct Amazon-to-buyer sales approach is no different from what happens at most other big online retailers except for its variety of items. You can find clothes, precious jewelry, gourmet food, sporting items, animal toys, books, CDs, DVDs, computer systems, furniture, children’s toys, garden supplies, bed linens, and nearly anything else you might desire. What makes Amazon a giant remains in the details. Besides its incredible item variety, Amazon makes every possible attempt to personalize the purchaser experience. When you reach the homepage, you’ll find not only special deals and featured products; however, if you’ve been to Amazon.com before, you’ll likewise find some recommendations just for you. Amazon knows you by name and attempts to be your consumer. The embedded marketing methods that Amazon employs to personalize your experience are probably the best example of the company’s overall approach to sales: Know your client really, effectively. Client tracking is an Amazon fortress. Expect the website to stick a cookie on your hard drive. You’ll discover the benefits to this cookie from all sorts of useful functions that make your shopping experience quite cool, like suggestions based upon previous purchases and lists of evaluations and guides written by users who purchased the items you’re looking to purchase. The other primary function that puts Amazon.com on another level is the multi-leveled e-commerce method it utilizes. Amazon.com lets practically anybody sell practically anything utilizing its platform. You can discover sales on products offered straight by Amazon, like the books it sold back in the mid-’90s out of Jeff Bezos’ garage. You can likewise find items listed by third-party sellers– individuals, small businesses, and retailers like Target and Toys ‘R Us. You can find used goods, reconditioned items, and auctions. You might say that Amazon is simply the ultimate hub for selling products on the Web; other than that, the business has recently included a more extroverted angle to its technique. In addition to the affiliate program that lets anybody post Amazon links and earn a commission on click-through sales, there’s now a program that lets those affiliates (Amazon calls them “partners”) develop whole Websites based upon Amazon’s platform. They can develop mini-Amazon websites if they want to, building on Amazon’s substantial database of products and applications for their functions. If any purchases go through Amazon, you can develop a site such as Wise Wolf Industries, pull items straight from Amazon’s servers, compose your recommendations and guides and make a cut of any sales. Amazon has become a software designer’s playground.

Before we dig deeper into Amazon’s e-commerce approaches, let’s take a glance at the innovative infrastructure that makes the whole thing possible. Amazon has four software application advancement centers worldwide. These centers are continuously developing brand-new features for Amazon.com and developing the innovation to support them. Amazon Technology, Amazon E-commerce, Amazon Tools, Marketing, and Community. The huge technology core that keeps Amazon running is entirely Linux-based. Since 2005, Amazon has had the world’s three biggest Linux databases, with an overall capacity of 7.8 terabytes (TB), 18.5 TB, and 24.7 TB, respectively. The main Amazon information warehouse consists of 28 Hewlett Packard servers, with four CPUs per node, running Oracle 9i database software. The data storage facility has three functions: query, historical data, and ETL (extract, transform, and load– a primary database function that pulls data from one source and incorporates it into another). The inquiry servers (24.7 TB capability) included 15 TB of raw information in 2005; the click history servers (18.5 TB capability) hold 14 TB of raw data, and the ETL cluster (7.8 TB capacity) consists of 5 TB of raw information. Amazon’s innovative architecture handles countless back-end operations every day, along with questions from more than half a million third-party sellers. According to a report released by Oracle after it helped migrate Amazon’s data warehouse to Linux in 2003 and 2004, the central task process looks something like this: -In the 2003 holiday season, Amazon processed a top-end 1 million shipments and 20 million inventory updates in one day. Amazon’s sales volume suggests that countless people send their charge card numbers to Amazon’s servers daily, and security is a major concern. In addition to immediately securing credit card numbers during the checkout process, Amazon lets users pick to secure every piece of details they get in, like their address, gender, and name. -Amazon uses the Netscape Secure Commerce Server utilizing the SSL (protected socket layer) protocol. It stores all credit card numbers in a different database that’s not Internet-accessible, cutting off that possible entry point for hackers. Especially cautious customers can choose to input just a partial charge card number over the Internet and, after that, offer the rest by phone once the online order is complete. Aside from the usual security issues regarding online credit-card purchases, Amazon suffers from the same phishing issue pestered by eBay and PayPal, so keep an eye out for fake emails asking for your Amazon.com account details. Amazon’s approach to e-commerce leaves no stone unturned. Amazon has tried to patent nearly every element of its e-commerce architecture, drawing more than a little controversy for the affiliate program patent it recovered in 2000. Other e-commerce websites were currently using affiliate programs that looked a lot like the one Amazon established and patented. Here are just a few of Amazon’s dozens of patents: Internet-based customer referral system, US Patent 6,029,141, February 22, 2000 Content personalization based upon actions performed throughout a current searching session, United States Patent 6,853,982, February 8, 2005 Method and system for integrating transaction mechanisms over numerous web websites, US Patent 6,882,981, April 19, 2005 Use of product viewing histories of users to identify related products, US Patent 6,912,505, June 28, 2005.

Amazon.com has constantly sold items out of its storage facilities. It started as a bookseller, basic and pure. Over the last years, it has branched out into additional product areas and the third-party sales that now represent a good chunk of its revenue (some price quotes put it at 25 percent). Both merchants and individual sellers make use of the Amazon.com platform to sell goods. Big sellers like Nordstrom, Land’s End, and Target utilize Amazon.com to offer their products in addition to offering them through their websites. The sales go through Amazon.com and end up at Nordstrom.com, Land’s End.com, or Target.com for processing and order satisfaction. Amazon essentially rents area to these retailers, who utilize Amazon.com as an extra outlet for their online sales. Small sellers of used and new items go to Amazon Marketplace, Amazon shops, or Amazon Auctions. At Marketplace, sellers offer products at a repaired rate, and at Auctions, they offer their things to the highest bidder. Amazon Shops includes only items at set rates. Suppose an item is listed on Shops, Marketplace, or Auctions and sold on the main website. In that case, it will appear in a box next to the Amazon.com item so buyers can see if someone else is offering the product for less in among the other sales channels, if any. Online websites can match Amazon’s prices. Sellers ship several products to Amazon, and Amazon manages the entire sales from start to finish. In all these programs, Amazon gets a cut of each sale (generally about 10 percent to 15 percent) and often charges additional listing or subscription costs; when it comes to Amazon’s Advantage channel, the company takes a 55 percent commission on each sale. The Advantage channel is a consignment setup, a sales avenue for people who create their music CDs or have self-published a book and are simply looking for a way to get it out there. Among the newest additions to Amazon’s repertoire is a subsidiary business called Amazon Services. Through Amazon Services, Amazon sells its sales platform, supplying total Amazon e-commerce packages to companies seeking to establish or revamp their e-commerce organization. Amazon sets up full Web sites and innovative backbones for other e-commerce companies utilizing Amazon software and innovation. For example, besides having a shop on Amazon.com, Target uses Amazon Services to develop and manage its e-commerce site. But offering goods isn’t the only method to make cash with Amazon.com. The website’s affiliate program is among the most popular online. Through Amazon’s Associate Program, anyone with a website can post a link to Amazon.com and make some money. The link can display a single product selected by the associate, or it can list numerous “finest seller” products in a specific category, in which case Amazon updates the list instantly at pre-programmed intervals. The partner gets a cut of any sale made straight through that link. The cut varies from 4 to 7.5 percent, depending upon which category the product is in. The partner can also make the most of Amazon Web Services, which is the program that lets individuals utilize Amazon’s utilities for their purposes. The Amazon Web Services API (application programs interface) lets designers access the Amazon technology infrastructure to construct their applications for their websites. All product sales generated by those Websites must go through Amazon.com, and the associate gets a small commission on each sale.

In the next section, we’ll look at how all these channels and programs come together to develop a sales and marketing powerhouse. Amazon on Paper delivers print brochures to a limited number of Amazon customers during the holiday season. Amazon Light, built and preserved by software application designer Alan Taylor, is one of Amazon’s satellite sites. Alan Taylor does not work for Amazon.com. He signed up with the Associate Program, registered for Amazon Web Services, downloaded the API, and developed Amazon Light. The objective is straightforward: “To be Earth’s many customer-centric businesses where people can find anything they desire to purchase online.” The application is complex, huge, and dynamic. Amazon’s marketing structure is a lesson in cost-efficiency and dazzling self-promotion. Amazon’s partners link to Amazon products to add worth to their websites, sending people to Amazon to make their purchases. It costs Amazon practically nothing. The level of consumer tracking at Amazon.com is another best-of-breed system. Using the data, it gathers on every signed-up user throughout every visit to the website; Amazon points users to products they might be delighted to find– and buy. Amazon suggests products that are comparable to what you’re presently looking for (on-the-fly suggestions that consume lots of processing power) associated with what you’ve searched for or clicked at any time in the past, purchased by other people who’ve searched for what you’re looking for or have bought what you’ve bought. You can even tailor the suggestions by offering Amazon more information about yourself and your interests and ranking the items you’ve already bought. -A current development in client tracking gathers info on people who may have never visited Amazon.com. Amazon’s gift-giving recommendations gather information on the stuff you purchase for other individuals. If you purchase a toy train set in December and deliver it to your nephew, Amazon understands you offer presents to a boy aged four to 10 who lives in Ohio and likes trains. If your nephew enjoys the train set, he may likewise have an interest in RC cars and trucks. When the next vacation season rolls around, Amazon will give you all sorts of concepts about what to get your nephew. This kind of detailed event has created a reasonable amount of controversy. Some say Amazon gathers too many details for comfort, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center reports that in 2000, Amazon began sharing its consumer data with its subsidiaries and partners. The concern has increased with the tracking of “gift-giving routines.” Since the gift-giving information Amazon gathers could be about minors, the present receivers do not even understand that there: name, age, gender, area, and interests will become stored in Amazon’s database of consumer details. Despite the issues of Big Brother, people still love the tailored experience Amazon provides. It’s not just sales offers– there’s a community on Amazon.com that’s based upon people providing even more info about themselves to other Amazon users. Individuals write their reviews, suggestions, “So You ‘d Like To …” guides and “List mania” lists based upon Amazon’s item offerings and share them with all of Amazon.com.

Beyond e-commerce and its trappings, some more recent Amazon endeavors have the business branching into brand-new realms. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk job seeks to combine compensation, innovation, and neighborhood. Using the Mechanical Turk system, web and software developers can publish tasks they need help with. Typically, jobs that computer systems can’t do. Still, humans can rapidly caption a set of images. Anyone can post a job, and the individual who completes it gets a little amount of cash in return. Amazon gets a commission on each finished deal. In a much more noticeable trek into the unknown, Amazon has funded the A9 search engine. It has full search capabilities, mapping functions, a toolbar with pop-up stopping, and an easily available individual search history. A9 likewise supplies a “Diary” where you can make notes to yourself about specific Web pages and lists of advised links for you to look at based on your previous searches. In keeping with Amazon’s universal marketing strategies, you can register to get an Amazon.com discount rate for using A9 frequently. When you type in a search term, you’ll see a screen of Amazon book results associated with that term. From a “Where’s Amazon going?” point of view, possibly the most significant task is the previously discussed Amazon Services subsidiary. Amazon Services is building complete e-commerce options for prospective Amazon competitors, exposing the possibility that Amazon will ultimately head in the instructions of innovation service over retail sales.