Founded in 1994 by Jeffrey Bezos, Amazon is the largest online electronic retailer in the United States. Amazon is a Fortune 500 company providing service worldwide and boasting revenues three times that of its closest competitor. Originally an online bookstore, Amazon launched its original website in 1995 and now sells an extensive assortment of different products including clothing, jewelry, baby products and apparel, gourmet food items, beauty products, sporting goods, music CDs, DVDs, video tapes and games, appliances, electronics and many other products (History, 2010).
The Amazon website is extremely user friendly. If a customer has never placed an order there is a “Placing Your First Order” help page, in addition to help pages on “Using the Shopping Cart” and “One-Click Ordering”. Customers will find that all products are displayed with in-depth product details, which usually include numerous detailed customer reviews and ratings. On the rare occasion that a customer is unable to find needed information on the website they may want to perform their own web search regarding the product; however it has been my experience that 99% of the products are displayed with all necessary details and numerous in-depth customer reviews. I especially enjoy shopping the Amazon Music department because customers are able to preview all songs on a CD before placing their order (“Help,” 2011).
Another excellent feature of the website is that all sellers are rated by their previous customers and these ratings are prominently displayed on the website along with the number of customers with which they have completed sales. This allows the customer to decide whether they want to place an order with a newer seller or one that has already established their rating with a significant number of sales. Once the order has been placed, the customer has access to it and is able to go back at any point and pull it up for review. Once the order has shipped the customer is also able to...