Hemantha Abeywardena writes from London…
Caterina Fake, the co-founder of Flickr was one of them. “Do you want to be an entrepreneur? Then, drop out of the college,” she said in one of her famous blog posts while knowing very well that the statistics were not on her side to support the provocative assertion.
Among those who have every right to stand shoulder to shoulder with the well-known giants, but in a league of his own, is Jeff Bezos, the founder of online giant Amazon.
Amazon. co.uk, the UK arm of the online megastore, reached another milestone this week with the launch of Amazon Local, which offers its customers with discounted deals based on their locations, exactly the way the likes of Groupon and Wowcher do their business at present.
The birth of Amazon Local comes hard on the heels of the success of the online giant as the UK’s most popular online store. Judging by Amazon’s success in every field that it got itself into, there is little doubt that the company will excel in the latest adventure too while silencing its critics; Amazon has been proving this particular species wrong for almost a decade, after all.
I have been a customer with Amazon even before it started UK operations – and when it was just an online book store. I used to order books from its American store – the only one that existed at that time in late 90’s – which came in time as promised by the store, given the significance distance involved. Then there was the unmistakable label – a unique thing at that time – which you can use to return the item, just in case you find it, was not living up to your expectations - the most formidable stepping stone in its long arduous journey towards the noble goal of maintaining customer-care as its core philosophy.
Amazon was paying a heavy price for adopting this particular approach in its infancy: share price plunged; its limited cash reserves haemorrhaged; initial investors looked for escape routes for individual survival.
I am sure those were the days that Mr Bezos would like to erase from his conscious – and then completely wipe out from the sub-conscious: Amazon was struggling to make a profit despite being the most famous e-commerce store online at that time; the analysts and main-stream media were cruel with a catalogue of forecasts about imminent collapse of both the company and the concept it was built upon; the spectacular failure of .dotcom bubble did very little to alleviate the impact.
Not only did Mr Bezos persevere to turn around his company but also elevated himself to an unassailable spiritual height to see a distant commercial landscape, which many of us never envisaged: he saw the emergence of e-books over the printed and introduced the Kindle e-reader with a corresponding Kindle store while reducing the distance between a customer and a book to a mere mouse-click; he foresaw the possibility of expansion of his company beyond books while taking into account the reputation that the company had as a store with a conscience; he recognized the need of the cloud-computing and turned Amazon into a pioneer in the emerging field.
After becoming the most trusted online brand in the UK this year, Amazon has been maintaining its firm grip on the enviable position for two successive quarters this year. Amazon, with its intuitive approach for both sellers and buyers alike, forced its competitors to follow its business model with plenty of catching-up to do.
While shedding light on its rapid expansion, Mr Bezos said that it was the customers who started clamouring for more when they came to buy books in his store. Mr Bezos made the success of Amazon irreversible by nurturing its reputation for reliability, improving on the navigation of the site despite the enormity of the store and above all, making brand Amazon synonymous with online-trading.
With 160 million loyal customers across the globe and over 56,000 employees in his company, Mr Bezos naturally becomes one of the most-sought-after CEO’s on the planet. Mr Bezos repeatedly claimed that he cared for the aspirations of the customers which, according to some of former employees, bordered on obsession. He is, however, in a minority of bosses who can clearly sense not only what customers want but also what they hate – defects, delays and the unavailability when the need is desperate.
Mr Bezos has created a retailing giant that we can access in the comfort of our home with a click of a mouse. The shoppers, both novices and veterans, know it is a reliable store for their internet shopping. My own buying experience that spanned well over a decade has always been pleasant regardless of the size of the shopping basket – be it toothpaste, laptop or even HDTV; I am sure I am not in a minority. The rapidly-growing services of the online giant speak for themselves.
It is Dale Carnegie who advised us how to win friends and influence people. If Mr Bezos followed in Mr Carnegie’s footstep, he could easily write a best-seller while cashing in on something which kept him at a distinct advantage – Amazon bookshop.
If he titled the book, “How to win customers and influence trading ethics,” it would be an instant hit, because the traders who practise the opposite are rife on the internet while inadvertently promoting the vile doctrine, “How to alienate customers and blow up the boundaries of fair trade”.
- Asian Tribune -
