Introduction

The e-commerce platform in the recent days gave grown to a huge extent with the availability of internet in a worldwide basis and this has resulted in the emergence of many risk factors in e-commerce field. E-commerce provides access to different products and services to its users over the internet and this has benefited the service and production industry up to a great extent. In the below discussed report, the global company Amazon is being reviewed and the risks faced and managed by the company is being discussed (Laudon & Traver, 2016).  Amazon previously known as Cadabra was established in the year 1994 in Washington, United States of America by Jeff Bezos. Amazon today is considered to be the largest e-commerce marketplace in a global platform. It is also the largest company in terms of revenue collection in the world and also provides one the best cloud based service and AI assistance.

Discussion

Business Profile

Jeff Bezos established the company Amazon in the year 1994 in Washington, United States of America which focuses on services like cloud based server, e-commerce and very recently artificial intelligence also. Amazon is one of the best organization according to revenue in terms of an Internet Company and also in the United States it is the second largest employer. The company was initially established as an online book store but later on expanded to sell electronic gadgets, softwares, apparel, furniture, video games and toys. Amazon also started its cloud based service known as the Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2002 which later provided online data storage and elastic compute cloud. The headquarters of Amazon are located in Seattle, Washington and Virginia, United States and the most important people in the company are considered to be Jeff Bezos who is the Chairman, president and CEO of the company and Werner Vogels is the CTO. Some of the major products that are developed and sold by amazon are Amazon fire, Echo by Amazon, Amazon Kindle and Amazon Fire TV. Amazon also provides certain services to its clients via Amazon Appstore, Amazon Alexa and Amazon Prime Services. However in the internet based service world, Amazon has many competitors who give tough competition to them. Some of the major competitors of Amazon are Alibaba group, Walmart Inc. and Google LLC. Amazon has built its cloud based system to provide cloud support to their clients in order to reduce their software and hardware complications which has resulted in the huge revenue earned by the company (Ritala, Golnam & Wegmann, 2014). The domain of amazon.com attracts over 615 million visitors annually to their websites which has made the company invest heavily in server capacity. Amazon has the ticker symbol AMZN and a sales growth of almost 30.93 %. Amazon also registered some record number of turnover in the recent years which resulted in establishing it as one of the top revenue generating IT Company in the world. The services of Amazon are spread throughout the globe in continents of Asia, North and South America as well as Europe. In the recent years, Amazon has developed the cloud based platform to a great extent which has resulted in huge turnovers for the company. The below graph shows the profit of Amazon from the year 2008 to the financial year of 2018.

E-commerce operations

The operations in any organization plays a very important role in the performance and maintenance of the company and also helps in increasing efficiency of the employees. Operations include all the activities and steps performed by organizations and its employees. A successful e-commerce organization like Amazon needs a strong and robust operations strategy for its effective performance. The key strategies included in the operations strategy should include order logistics and fulfillment, inventory management and domestic and global shipping (Schniederjans, Cao & Triche, 2013). The operations strategy should also be precise and well researched so that the orders will get fulfilled on time, which will keep the customers happy and as a result the company will earn revenue. Amazon being one of the leading companies in term of operation management, has a very robust and well defined operations structure. Amazon maintains some strategic decisions in their operations management so as to maintain and control all of its operations.

The design of services and goods under organizational output is maintained by technology of amazon. Amazon’s e-commerce operations are made efficient by such technologies and operations. Quality management also plays an important role in the operations department (Mohapatra, 2013). Amazon has certain aspects regarding the quality management to improve their e-commerce business. Amazon encourages its employees to enhance new ideas to solve problems in order to improve their operational structure in business improving. Location strategy and capacity design is also an important aspect of operations management. Amazon uses a variety of automations in order to enhance their performance and productivity (Trautman, 2015). This process includes the automation of the ordering process and locations for the accessibility of resources and also the markets for business. Amazon gives importance in case of selecting their warehouse or fulfillment center for better communication with their online customers. The layout strategy, human resources, scheduling and maintenance helps in the overall operations plan in Amazon or any such e-commerce organization (Chaffey, Hemphill & Edmundson-Bird, 2015). The Hoover’s report also signifies and suggests the above mentioned structure of Amazon as an e-commerce website.     

Requirements for Cyber security in E-commerce

Cyber security has become a global concern with the increase in the use of internet based services in a worldwide basis. Cyber security is also needed in case of e-commerce website in order to maintain their services and the database and important credentials of their customers. A company like Amazon takes billions of credentials like birth dates, driver’s license number, addresses and the most important credit card numbers on a daily basis which indicates that a huge number of customers are exposed in their cloud based databases (Chou, 2013). Trust is the most important aspect in such cases, and here Amazon uses SSL certificates to advise their customers that their transactions are encrypted and secured (Von Solms & Van Niekerk, 2013). The website security is also a concern in case of Amazon to prevent any external breaches which might affect their services and business. The back office also provides adequate amount of support to the company about the back end security and technical support. The installation and configuration of cyber security systems in Amazon are also looked after by their back office support which enhances their performance by smoothly delivering their service to the customers (Fredendall & Hill, 2016). Thus the above mentioned business process are required for the smooth performance of the Amazon website and services.

Conclusion

The risks that are associated with the risk management analysis of the e-commerce industry are discussed in the above report and thus it can be concluded from the report that proper operation management are needed in the e-commerce industries and proper cyber security infrastructure is also to be implemented. The e-commerce organization Amazon has certain operational and cyber security models which are implemented but there are certain flaws in them too which sometimes result in problem in their business.

References

Laudon, K. C., & Traver, C. G. (2016). E-commerce: business, technology, society.

Ritala, P., Golnam, A., & Wegmann, A. (2014). Coopetition-based business models: The case of Amazon. com. Industrial Marketing Management, 43(2), 236-249.

Schniederjans, M. J., Cao, Q., & Triche, J. H. (2013). E-commerce operations management. World Scientific Publishing Company.

Mohapatra, S. (2013). E-commerce Strategy. In E-Commerce Strategy (pp. 155-171). Springer, Boston, MA.

Fredendall, L. D., & Hill, E. (2016). Basics of supply chain management. CRC Press.

Chaffey, D., Hemphill, T., & Edmundson-Bird, D. (2015). Digital business and e-commerce management. Pearson UK.

Chiu, C. M., Wang, E. T., Fang, Y. H., & Huang, H. Y. (2014). Understanding customers’ repeat purchase intentions in B2C e‐commerce: the roles of utilitarian value, hedonic value and perceived risk. Information Systems Journal, 24(1), 85-114.

Von Solms, R., & Van Niekerk, J. (2013). From information security to cyber security. computers & security, 38, 97-102.

Trautman, L. J. (2015). E-Commerce, cyber, and electronic payment system risks: lessons from PayPal. UC Davis Bus. LJ, 16, 261.

Chou, T. S. (2013). Security threats on cloud computing vulnerabilities. International Journal of Computer Science & Information Technology, 5(3), 79.