Amazon.com Restructuring Solutions (Essay Sample)

Restructuring Strategies for Amazon.com to Boost Revenue Generation
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Institution Amazon.com Restructuring Solutions
Amazon operates as a virtual company that utilizes Internet-based electronic platforms to connect sellers and buyers. As an online business platform, its success is to a large extent driven by its ability to attract a huge online traffic and offer cheaper purchase alternatives to traditional retailers. In addition, the company’s revenue generation is primarily driven by the integration of different services into its website, thus providing a one-stop retail store for a variety of consumer products. However, given the unlimited potential of the Internet in terms of its audience reach and data storage, Amazon can increase its productivity by customizing some of its services and improving user experience by creating a forum for information sharing among visitors to its website.
In this regard, there are two viable restructuring solutions that the company should consider implementing. The first one is establishing a user-generated content forum where buyers and sellers can exchange information about their online experiences on Amazon’s websites. The second solution is customizing its online bookstore by offering library services to students and learning institutions. The first strategy will allow the company to collect reliable and real-time metrics about user preferences, which will provide insights into the kind of products and transaction mechanisms that users prefer. The forum will also help the company to address user complaints as a means of improving user satisfaction. The customization of book services will help the company to create a distinct market niche by exploiting the demand for educational resources among students and learning institutions.
User generated content include the information that users share on the social media. This information can have a big impact on online sales depending on whether users post negative or positive experiences regarding the products bought online or Internet services accessed (Chevalier & Mayzlin, 2006). Towards this end, the company should restructure its customer care services by creating a social media platform where visitors and the customer service staff can interact on an ongoing basis, as opposed to waiting for dissatisfied users to make follow-ups. Accordingly, the role of the customer care staff will not be merely waiting for and responding to customer complaints, but engaging users in constant interactions to allow the company identify potential problems, and address them before they occur. In addition, interaction with customers will enable the company to collect useful data about online experiences that they find satisfying, which it will use to improve its services.
The need for a platform to share user generated content is made the more necessary by the fact that Amazon receives close to two hundred millions visitors daily (The Statistics Portal, 2015). Given this high traffic volume, issues related to negative user experience are inevitable, hence the need for an internal forum where customers can share these issues and have them addressed, instead of posting them in other social media, such as Facebook, where they can cause the company negative publicity.
Students and learning institutions provide arguably the largest market for educational resources like books, journals, and online knowledge databases. The demand that students and learning institutions provide is sufficient to have a separate online retail subsidiary for these two categories of users. Although the company’s Kindle application allows users to download books, this service does not serve specific needs for students who need access to course readings without having to buy every course book. In this regard, Amazon should restructure its online bookstore by establishing an online library where students and educational institutions can access knowledge resources for a fee. This service can be designed to function like other established online databases such as EBSCOhost. The company can take advantage of its strong online presence and brand name to attract new customers. In addition, it can contract learning institutions to allow access to library databases for students. Such contracts will help the company to boost revenues from access ...