Seven Lessons That Businesses Can Learn From E-Commerce Giant Amazon

When attempting to build a successful e-commerce plan, you don’t need to look much further than Amazon’s e-commerce business model. Amazon is not only one of the earliest and most popular eCommerce platforms, but also the longest running and most consistently successful. From its early history as an online bookseller to its current status as the US’s largest e-commerce company, Amazon has grown its sales model and skillfully navigated multitudes of challenges as it moved from a twentieth to a twenty-first-century company.

Here are some of the key elements found in Amazon’s model, as well as some ideas on how you can apply them to your own business:

1. Personalization

Remember that online shopping is an experience as well as a means to an end. A one-size-fits-all approach is unlikely to provide a pleasurable online customer experience. One of Amazon’s greatest successes is the way it has skillfully built personalized home pages which use past searches and interests to recommend a tailored list of products. In this way, Amazon has transformed itself from a company that sells everything to a website that curates a personal shopping list.

2. Need for speed

If a website’s pages take a long time to load, customers will simply lose interest and go somewhere else. Amazon has researched the relationship between speed and customer retention and adjusted its own site accordingly. An additional delay of 0.5 seconds to page-load time causes a 20% drop in traffic. Never sacrifice speed for bells and whistles and test your web pages’ performance.

3. Usability (keeping it simple)

Amazon’s simple interface—in which a customer can look at products, decide on a purchase, and easily pay with only a few steps—illustrates the company’s no-frills, easy to navigate approach. It also saves addresses, allows customers to configure primary addresses and payment plans, and streamlines customer accounts.

4. Reviews

Consumers trust online reviews from validated sources. Think of reviews as a form of content marketing; they can describe the key selling points of a product in detail. Amazon goes a step further than the average Joe. Their space efficient and user-friendly dedicated review page illustrates how to make reviews simple to access and easy to find helpful reviews. Reviews are sorted according to rating and can be easily filtered or up- or down-voted according to usefulness, causing the best reviews to rise to the top, which further validates the worthiness (or lack thereof) of the product.

5. Transactional emails

Transactional emails, or automatic emails deploying orders, shipping, etc., have higher opening rates than other emails, and encourage customer interaction and repeat sales. Amazon also leverages automatic emails to encourage customers to rate and review products. In addition, personalized emails, sent directly to the customer based on purchasing habits, connect the customer to special offers or a perfectly-timed coupon.

6. Mobility first

By emphasizing a mobile-friendly website with options such as auto-fill or one-click ordering, Amazon has become an industry leader in mobile e-commerce. It’s important not just because e-commerce is going mobile, but also because Amazon experiments with new interfaces and emerging trends. Do not be afraid to experiment to improve customer satisfaction, and remember to test your site to verify usability and performance on mobile.

7. Free, no-hassle Shipping and Returns

More than in almost any other area, Amazon has set the standard for e-commerce by offering cheap and fast shipping with free, easy returns. It was also Amazon who has made two-day shipping normal. E-commerce lends itself to frequent returns, and customers feel better knowing they can exchange products easy.

While these are seven crucial lessons that can be learned from Amazon’s rise to the top, there are many more lessons to be learned from them. We’ll cover a few of  their other signature successes, such as Amazon Prime and free 2 day shipping in more depth in the future. Knowing what works best in e-commerce is essential to making your own brand and company compete with the best, but don’t sacrifice originality. Amazon wasn’t copying another e-commerce giant for all of their tricks but they weren’t afraid to learn a few tricks from those around them and adapt them to their own marketplace. Learn from their successes and make them your own.