Amazon is Continuing to Evolve and Dominate the Ecommerce World
"Nothing wilts faster than laurels that have been rested on"
So goes the line from legendary poet Percy Bysshe Shelly, who admonished the dangers of becoming too complacent once success has been achieved. And few would argue that ecommerce titan, Amazon has achieved success.
Growing from, a then unknown entrepreneur, Jeff Bezos selling books from his garage on one of the world’s very first ecommerce stores, to an online juggernaut which dominates the retail world and has made its founder one of the richest men on the planet, Amazon’s success is one which many have tried to replicate but nobody has yet achieved.
And refusing to wilt by resting on its laurels is a big part of its success story and an ethos Amazon carries with it into the second decade on the 21st century.
Amazon
The secret to Amazon’s success is not, as many believe, its hugely popular ecommerce store, but rather the technology which underpins it. The online retail arm of its business is in fact a loss leader which exists to promote the real source of Amazon’s staggering profits – Amazon Web Services.
Continually expanding the cloud computing technology of AWS, Amazon has recently announced a slew of enhancements designed to make its customers, which include startups, large enterprises, and government agencies, more agile and able to innovate more rapidly at a lower cost than would otherwise be possible.
During the AWS Summit in San Francisco in April 2022, Vice President of Data, Analytics, and Machine Learning Services at AWS, Swami Sivasubramanian, revealed the details on several new product offerings across multiple service categories, including databases, machine learning, IoT, and application development.
- Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 helps brands better meet peak demand.
- Amazon SageMaker Serverless is a cost-effective way to run applications with intermittent or unpredictable traffic.
- AWS IoT TwinMaker allows businesses to create digital twins of real-world systems like buildings, factories, industrial equipment, and production lines.
- AWS Amplify Studio empowers developers to create fully customizable web applications on AWS with minimal coding.
- Amazon Textract uses machine learning technology to automatically extract text, handwriting, and other data from any document or image.
- Amazon QuickSight Embedded Analytics Partner Program helps customers create and share interactive analytics with end users.
These fresh developments build on the thousands of additional benefits Amazon adds to its AWS offering each year.
"In 2021 alone, we added 3,084 services and significant features," said Sivasubramanian. "That is 3,084 more capabilities that our customers are equipped with to address the needs of today and the future. Since the challenges for a customer today are often different from the ones of tomorrow, it makes it all the more important to pick the cloud provider that will be the best technology partner now but also in the future."
A Data Driven Approach
Recent research by Forrester has discovered those organizations which take a data-driven approach to decision-making grow more than 30% annually. However, according to a recent Accenture study 68% of companies are not able to realize tangible and valuable benefits from the data they hold due to outdated capabilities.
"It requires leaders to truly embrace data-driven decision making and set the expectation that decisions need to be anchored in data," added Sivasubramanian. "They also need to lead by example, and make data driven decision making. And there are also technical challenges when it comes to setting up access control and scaling your data infrastructure."
With the latest developments made by AWS, customers can expand and improve the ability of their organization to make the most out of the data they possess and create a scalable and flexible strategy better designed for the contemporary ecommerce landscape.
"Your infrastructure should serve the needs of the business data at every stage of its journey, from databases and data lakes, to putting it to work through analytics and machine learning with the right governance and controls embedded throughout," he concluded. "Our customers are using AWS tools and services to become data-driven organizations and make faster data decisions."
Final Thoughts
As the real profit driver behind Amazon’s ecommerce success, AWS is a constantly evolving beast which allows ecommerce brands in every sector to become more competitive and better able to leverage the greatest value from technology.
With Google eliminated third party cookie support from 2023, companies are going to need to get wiser when it comes to getting the best out of their data if they want to remain competitive and relevant in the future.
Amazon’s success is sure to be part of the conversation at eTail Connect West 2022, taking place in September at the Hilton La Jolla Torrey Pines, CA.
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