Amazon has come a long way from its humble beginnings as a book wholesaler since 1997. Back then, their business model was similar to that of most companies selling their products online. Today, they have become leaders in every field they venture into. Gradually, Amazon has become the largest eCommerce retailer by online revenue in the world. As Statista’s chart presents, e-commerce net sales of Amazon are projected to reach 127,024 million USD this year:

Together with its large marketplace, Amazon dominates the online retail space🤴. It's no wonder then that Amazon is a strong competitor for most e-commerce businesses.

Learn from Amazon… through this blog series

There are a lot of things that go into running a successful online business, and there are a lot of things that you can do to create an “Amazon competitive universe”💪. But what are the important parameters you should be mindful of, and which channels should you utilize to compete with Amazon?

To understand: Firstly, what Amazon is good at; secondly, how they run their platform; and thirdly, which parameters they used in the past to become one of the highest valued companies in the world.

To help you learn from Amazon, the global e-commerce empire, we’ve rounded up an Amazon series with three blog posts 📖! In addition to this article, you can learn more on how Amazon utilizes product recommendations and marketing emails to drive sales and revenue

• How Amazon Optimizes For Conversions: 8 Tricks You Never Knew!
• 3 Secret Ways to Do Email Marketing Like Amazon

First things first, let’s take a look back at...

How Amazon started

When Jeff Bezos decided to found Amazon, books were the second biggest product category in the world. The book category contained the most varied selection of items, and at the time, that made books "the most attractive product category to sell online," explained Jeff Bezos 📚.

“I picked books as the first best product to sell online, making a list of like 20 different products that you might be able to sell. Books were great as the first best because books are incredibly unusual in one respect, that is that there are more items in the book category than there are items in any other category by far. ”

- Jeff Bezos, 1997

No matter how big a brick-and-mortar store there is, it could never come close to having an assortment that could offer all existing books. Granted, people were able to go to bookstores and request a book they wanted from the clerk. The clerk would order it and have it in-store within a few days.

But the question was: why bother to go to the store in the first place if you would have to wait to receive the book anyway?

And that is where Bezos saw an opportunity in the market.

Now, you have an idea of how this mastermind was thinking. From the beginning, he was steps ahead of everyone else. Keep in mind that back then, e-commerce was not a thing. At least not as it is today. Nowadays, anyone can easily open a webshop. Platforms like Shopify have templates that make the process very easy, and the costs of running a webshop are minimal.

Although running an online business is easily accessible today, only a small portion of us think the way Bezos does when deciding what products to sell online.

Google Ads: A secret to Amazon’s success

From the beginning, Bezos put a lot of thought into his business, and soon he built the biggest webshop in the entire world. Shoppers could buy nearly every book on Amazon.com 🤩

How did he get customers to visit his webshop?!

He did what the rest of us do. He started buying Ads on Google. In fact, he bought so many, which made Amazon Google’s leading customer for many years. In 2011, Amazon spent 55.2 million USD on Google advertising. This budget kept growing, and till the year 2018, Amazon spent approximately 22.8 million USD per month on Google AdWords.

Do other companies also invest so much in Google Ads?

Do you know a little company by the name of Expedia? Yes, then can we agree that it is now a big corporation, and you almost always end on their site every single time you are looking to book a flight or a hotel room?

Okay, then. Try to imagine how much money they spend on Google Ads. Expedia has an annual ad budget of $5.69 million 😱

Google Ads works, and many businesses' continuous investment in it has also proven that. As for Amazon, Google Ads has helped drive tons of organic visits to its webshop every day! As the latest stats show, worldwide Amazon.com had over 2.7 billion combined desktop and mobile visits in June 2021:

In short, what’s to take away from this? 👉 Keep focusing on your SEO and Google Ads!

If you want to learn more about how to improve your site ranking and drive more traffic to your webshop, check out this beginner-level, actionable SEO guide.

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