amazon.com - characteristics, special features

Characteristics & Special Features

A popular feature of Amazon is the ability for users to submit reviews to the web page of each product. As part of their review, users must rate the product on a rating scale from one to five stars. Such rating scales provide a basic idea of the popularity and dependability of a product. The review feature is an important and highly influential function for customers and was certainly one of the main reasons for amazon.com’s success at selling books.

Search Inside the Book is a feature which makes it possible for customers to search for keywords in the full text of many books in the catalog. The feature started out with 120,000 titles (or 33 million pages of text) on October 23, 2003. There are currently about 250,000 books in the program. Amazon has cooperated with around 130 publishers to allow users to perform these searches. To avoid copyright violations, Amazon.com does not return the computer-readable text of the book but rather a picture of the page containing the found excerpt, disables printing of the pages, and puts limits on the number of pages in a book a single user can access. However, with judicious use of keywords, it is possible to read an entire book on Amazon for free. The most efficient way to do this is using the Minimal Amazon Covering Set method. Amazon is planning to launch Search Inside the Book internationally. Additionally, customers can purchase access to read the entire book online via the Amazon Upgrade program, although the selection of books eligible for this service is currently limited.

According to information in Amazon.com discussion forums, Amazon derives about 40% of its sales from affiliates, whom they call "Associates." An Associate is an independent seller or business that receives a commission for referring customers to the Amazon.com site. Associates do this by placing links on their websites to the Amazon homepage or to specific products. If a referral results in a sale, the Associate receives a commission from Amazon. Worldwide, Amazon has "over 900,000 members" in its affiliate programs. Associates can access the Amazon catalog directly on their websites by using the Amazon Web Services (AWS) XML service. Amazon was one of the first online businesses to set up an affiliate marketing program. AStore is a new affiliate product that allows Associates to embedded a subset of Amazon products within, or linked to from, another website.

According to the Internet audience measurement website Compete.com, Amazon attracts approximately 50 million U.S. consumers to its website on a monthly basis


Other products and services

Amazon Web Services

Amazon launched Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2002. The service provides programmatic access to many features leveraged behind the scenes on its own website. AWS was rapidly adopted by what now amount to tens of thousands of software developers.

Amazon S3

In March 2006, Amazon launched an online storage service called Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). An unlimited number of data objects, from 1 byte to 5 gigabytes in size, can be stored in S3 and distributed via HTTP or BitTorrent. The service charges monthly fees for data stored and for data transferred.

Amazon EC2

In August 2006, Amazon introduced Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a virtual site farm, allowing users to use the Amazon infrastructure with its high reliability to run diverse applications ranging from running simulations to web hosting.

Amazon Mechanical Turk

In November 2005, Amazon.com began testing Amazon Mechanical Turk, an application programming interface (API) allowing programs to dispatch tasks to human processors.

Amazon FPS

On August 2, 2007 Amazon launched a payment service specifically targeted at developers. Amazon FPS has facilities for developing many different charging models including micro-payments. The service also gives developers easy access to Amazon customers.

Amazon Unbox

On March 7, 2007, Amazon launched an Internet video on demand service. There has been criticism of the service due to its use of digital rights management (DRM).

Amazon MP3 Downloads

On September 25, 2007, Amazon launched a new music store (currently in beta) which sells downloadable tracks, all in the MP3 format and most recorded at 256 kilobits per second Variable bitrate (VBR). The Amazon MP3 Music Service: Terms of Use legally restrict use of the music, but Amazon does not use DRM to enforce those terms. Most songs cost US$0.89 or US$0.99, and most albums cost between US$4.95 and US$9.99. Participating record labels include EMI and Universal, as well as many independent labels. Previous to the launch of this service, Amazon made an investment in Amie Street, a similar music store with a variable pricing model based on demand.

Amazon Shorts

Amazon Shorts is a program launched in 2005. The program offers exclusive short form content including short stories and non-fiction pieces from best selling authors, all available for immediate download at US$0.49. As of June 2007, the program has over 1,700 pieces and is adding about 50 new pieces per week.

Amazon Prime

In February 2005, Amazon launched Amazon Prime in the continental United States. Amazon Prime subscribers pay US$79 per year and receive free 2-day shipping on all items shipped by Amazon with no minimum purchase amount. Overnight shipping for Prime members is US$3.99 per item. Prime benefits extend to four family members in the same household.
Amazon Prime became available in Japan in June 2007. Japanese customers may pay JP¥3,900 per year and receive same-day shipping on orders shipped to the Kantō region and next-day delivery to other locations.

Donations

In 2001, Amazon was one of the first online stores to begin accepting donations to the Red Cross on behalf of 9/11 victims. For several days the company dedicated its entire home page for this cause.
In 2004, Amazon launched its Presidential Candidates feature, whereby customers could donate from US$5 to US$200 to the campaigns of U.S. presidential hopefuls, resurrecting the Amazon Honor System for the purpose. The Honor System was originally launched in 2001 as a way for Amazon customers to "tip" their "favorite Web sites and to buy digital content on the Web," Amazon collecting 2.9% of the payment plus a flat fee of US$0.30. It has never been shut down, but had fallen into relative disuse.
At the end of 2004, with the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami in the Indian Ocean, Amazon set up an online donation channel to the American Red Cross using the Honor System, waiving its processing fee. As of January 3, 2005, over 162,000 individuals had donated over US$13.1 million in this way. The same week, Amazon created similar channels for the British, Canadian, French, German, and Japanese Red Cross organizations via its international sites. Over 7,000 Britons donated more than US$350,000; 900 Canadians over US$56,000; 660 French over US$23,000; 2,900 Germans over US$145,000; and 1,900 Japanese over US$66,000.

mazon reactivated its Red Cross donation channel when Hurricane Katrina struck at the end of August 2005. As of September 8, over 98,000 payments had been made totaling over US$10.7 million.

Amazon Connect

Amazon announced Amazon Connect in 2005. It enables authors to post remarks that appear at the bottom of the detail pages for each of their books and on the Amazon home page of those who have bought their books.

Amazon Vine

On August 15, 2007 Amazon launched a program called Amazon Vine, which allows the site's top product reviewers free access to prerelease products from vendors participating in the program.

Discussion boards

In August 2006, Amazon launched product wikis (later folded into Amapedia) and discussion forums for certain products. There are set guidelines that follow standard message board conventions. Discussion boards were later expanded to include deals in the Gold Box and to cover collections of items with the same user-provided tags.

Amapedia

In January 2007 Amazon launched Amapedia, a collaborative wiki for user-generated content related to "the products you like the most." Amapedia replaced Amazon's ProductWiki product, and all ProductWiki content was copied into Amapedia at launch.