| Welcome to vBulletin FAQ |
vBulletin FAQ Navigation
Getting Started
Customizing your vBulletin
Search Engines & SEO
Making Money with a Forum
Promoting your Community
|
| Get your own vBulletin Today |
|
| Webmaster Help |
|
|
|
Big Shots, Business the Amazon.com Way: Secrets of the Worlds Most Astonishing Web Business (2nd Edition)
vBulletin Book Store > vBulletin books beginning with B
|
Big Shots, Business the Amazon.com Way: Secrets of the Worlds Most Astonishing Web Business (2nd Edition) |
Author: Rebecca Saunders
Published: 2002-03-15 |
List price: $24.95
Our price: $22.45
|
Usually ships in 24 hours
As of: December 01st, 2008 08:06:07 PM
|
|
|
Customer comments on this selection.
 Simplistic, Outdated Guide to E-Commerce Success.
"Business the Amazon.com Way" (first edition) was published in 1999, at the height of dot-com mania, when Amazon had 1,000 employees and was trading at $209 a share. So it's hopelessly dated. The book might still have merit if it included a good history of Amazon's early years, but the information on Amazon's foundation and early growth is sketchy. This book was aimed at aspiring internet entrepreneurs, touting the endless possibilities for business on the web and presenting Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos as a shining example of e-commerce success. "Business the Amazon.com Way" is a simplistic handbook for web businesses more than a study of Amazon, and it looks even more naïve in retrospect, considering the dot-com crash.
br /
br /Author Rebecca Saunders catalogs the reasons for Amazon's success that could be applied to your internet start-up: know your customers, update pages frequently, link from related sites, have clear long-term goals, brand the site, be customer-centric, staffing and recruiting, a distribution plan for fast order fulfillment and delivery, frugality, state-of-the-art technology, constant innovation, continual growth. And we get a general idea of how Jeff Bezos and the early Amazonians went about accomplishing these things. But it's pretty simple stuff. I don't think "Business the Amazon.com Way" did anything more than state the obvious, in limited detail, in 1999. If you're looking for a primer on Amazon's early years, Robert Spector's "Amazon.com: Get Big Fast" (2000) is equally enthusiastic and uncritical, but it is much more useful.
 Very basic work
Very basic book on doing business via the web. This should have been released a generation ago when Amazon.com itself was finding its way. The new enterpreneur exploring online business is more knowledgeble than the informaiton and insight provided here and hence can disappoint reading it. It may be suitable for those who are hearing the name of e-business and trying to set up the business online for the first time in their country to know what happend when Jeff Bezos tried doing so for the first time in the history. Certainly this book is not for those who already heard about e-business.
200+ pages of nothing.
Ms. Saunders has taken riding someone else's wave to a new low - two waves really. The first is the branding and selling power of anything with "Amazon.com" on it. The second is the hope that this book will follow in the footsteps of Robert Spector's, "The Nordstrom Way," in giving the reader some insight into the world's leading and most successful e-commerce enterprise. Unfortunately, she fails to even remotely live up to either. pThe book is dry and completely uninformative. Even worse, it's factually incorrect. A couple examples (though there are many, many others):pAccording to Saunders, Amazon.com set up shop in Seattle, Washington because Ingram is there. Um, Ingram is in Oregon, not Washington. What the heck is the Federal Trust Commission? I think it's usually referred to as the Federal Trade Commission.pThese two errors and the many others in this book have regrettably been printed before - usually in the popular press - which speaks volumes about where she got her material.pThe book is marketed as an investigative look at the business model and "Ten Secrets" that make it work. Considering the legendary secrecy surrounding Amazon.com's business and the supposed investigative nature of this book, I find it pretty amazing that she knocked it out without attempting to consult a single (current or former) insider. But then again, after the first two pages it becomes very clear that she had no intention of going out of her way. The book itself is about as pure an attempt to capitalize on Amazon.com's success as could have been imagined. Oh, and the ten secrets touted on the cover are actually basic common sense and obvious to anyone who visits Amazon.com on any sort of a regular basis.pIf you're curious about Amazon.com, I say stick to Spector and read, "Amazon.com - Get Big Fast," (ISBN: 0066620414). pKeep in mind that as of this writing, there really is no truly in-depth factual piece on Amazon.com and it's business model. You can get more information about Amazon.com from the New York Times archives (online) or almost any Wall Street analyst who covers the company.
How much money came out of the pockets of Amazon Executives?
It seems like more and more these days books are being written by horrible authors that companies could pick up off the streets and have them write a book entirely about their company, but hide it as being a guide to successful e-commerce. If your looking at e-commerce, you don't just focus on one "semi-successful business", you focus on the many different e-commerce companies out there and you compare and contrast at their success. This book skims the surface on Amazon...but you are looking for more.
Rehashed Outlines of Old Newspaper and Magazine Stories
When a publisher doesn't like your book proposal, the way they try to let you down easily is to tell you it would make a good magazine article. Why would a publisher take on a book whose sources are newspapers, magazines, and books from an author who tell us she doesn't like to buy books on line from Amazon.com to write about a company that started as an on-line bookseller? Since you are obviously a fan of Amazon.com or you would not be reading this review, my opinion is that you could probably write a better history of the company and its success pattern than this book did based on your own experiences with the company.pGiven that everything in the book was from public sources, I could not understand how the author could call her points "secrets." But here they are:p(1) Understand e-commerce (2) Build an entrepreneurial team (3) Focus (4) Brand the site (5) Get and keep customers by offering value (6) Set up a distribution network (7) practice frugalityp(8) practice technoleverage (improve your performance with technology) (9) constantly reinvent your business model (10) add strategic alliances and acquisitions.pWhat does that tell you that you didn't know before? pOn the interesting question of whether Amazon.com will be able to sustain the cashflow losses, the author says nothing other than that the harvesting period is still ahead. pI compared this book to the book, Amazon.com, which had its own weaknesses, and found that this book lacked an authentic voice of reflecting what is different about the company it studies. Where are the anecdotes, the polls of customers, powerful material from message boards, and quantitative analyses of what happened? Even if Amazon.com executives would not talk to her, you can certainly do better than this.pOh, by the way, the facts were not well checked. Those I was familiar with were usually wrong. So you can't even rely on this book for baseline information.pI can go on with more reasons not to buy and read the book, but I don't want to waste your time. You have better things to do. pIn the same way that many Web Sites won't become valuable businesses, many books about Web businesses aren't going to do any better. Here is a fine example of that observation.p
|
|
Our vBulletin book picks:
|
|
Find more vBulletin related products of interest.
|
