Product details

This case opens at the end of 1998, three years after Jeff Bezos created the online book service, a company now considered one of the icons of the e-Commerce era. With no experience in the book industry, Jeff Bezos, aged 30, saw what the industry giants in book publishing and retailing failed to see: the huge opportunities to be realised in selling books over the Web. His hunch seemed to prove right: in its short existence amazon.com (although yet to show a profit) had been generating sales at an annual rate of USD600 million, and was growing at around 30% every three months. Not only was it the leading online shopping site in any category, it had begun internationalising as well, setting up amazon. com web sites in the UK and Germany, and Bezos himself was now worth over USD2 billion. The case asks: how had he done it? Was it simply a technology or price strategy? Or had Bezos intuitively understood the new market and economic dynamics, creating a new business model accordingly? And what must he do now, as competition intensifies from the traditional publishers and retailers, such as Bertelsmann and Barnes & Noble. How should Bezos respond?