Amazon – A Mystery for Sellers and Buyers!

Amazon has always a mystery for people who wish to make some extra money selling things online. It’s not the Amazon that only provides the opportunity to sell things to potential buyers, there are other popular marketplaces like eBay are too well-known. We can simply draw a comparison line between Amazon and eBay that they are into the same sector where buyers and seller explore each other for possible transactions. But both are completely different from each other so far as selling and buying methods are concerned. EBay is known for its auction style selling procedure and Amazon is well known for book selling. But both the online marketplaces have come a long way ahead. From Dot-Com to Web 3.0 through Web 2.0, a lot has been changed on World Wide Web and the way internet surfers behave online especially during online purchases.

If anybody asks me which WWW term is the most confusing, I would say “Web 2.0”. According to Wikipedia.org, “Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as a platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.” Web 2.0 revolution encourages lightweight, easy-to-use and user centric business models. In other sense we can assume that Web 2.0 ushered the era of Internet Independence. Amazon has rightly supported the Web 2.0 standards and has opened its solutions to other sellers. As a result Amazon sellers now can sell a lot variety of products apart from books.

The best thing about Amazon is that it offers a wide range of individual features to the customer that, when united, offer a very interactive experience. Due to this reason, Amazon successfully retains customers despite heavy competition from other marketplaces so far as price is concerned.

Features like Products Review, Tagging and Categorization, Product Rating, and even Product Review Rating by other customers have made Amazon a reliable source for buying and selling.

Over the course of time, a customer can build a reputation as a reviewer. This facilitates a sense of ownership on the site and encourages customers getting engaged on the site while shopping. Buyers can publish photos of the products they’ve bought. This all serves the customers by providing additional information that plays a major factor while making a purchasing decision.

But this does not stop here. An Amazon Buyer can prepare lists of various relative items that they can be recommended as a group.

This is all Open Data Contribution feature of Amazon. But Amazon also follows its buyers’ behaviour and gathers information from such buyers’ behaviour patterns. If an Amazon buyer looks at one product but ends up buying another, that’s a Data Point that can potentially control a purchasing decision for the next buyer. Amazon gathers this information and prepares a Product Ranking, along with additional information that eventually gets published along with the core product features.