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•136 The 100 Greatest Business Ideas of All Time

It is plainly not Bezos could not, of course, settle for being the leading online bookstore,

relevant to and Amazon.com has moved into many other areas. Amazon.com Auctions

value the gives its pre-registered customers the ability to buy and sell by auction items

company on its in more than 800 categories. With its service customers can not only bid

profits since it easily for things but even have some insurance against the eventuality that the

has none, but seller fails to deliver what the buyer thought he was getting.

currently Then they started to think of other things that could be sold in this

shareholders way. ‘No-one likes going to the drug-store’ says Peter Neupert, the Chief

value it at Executive of drugstore.com. Amazon.com have invested in this online

something like source for thousands of brand-name health and beauty products. Pets.com

15 times its also attracted the company’s attention with its popular and rare accesso-

projected ries, products and food for all sorts of animals.

annual sales. Want to send a greeting to somebody who is on the Web? Use the

Amazon.com free greeting card service with a huge choice of illustrations,

pictures, animated cards and messages to choose from. If this seems a bit impersonal,

you also have the ability to tailor the stock messages to suit your own preferences.

There is no doubt that many other markets are ripe for the Amazon approach.

Huge markets in leisure, brokerage, cars, furniture, shoes and hardware are already

online or on the way.

Luckily for Amazon they proved strong enough to survive the bursting of the

Internet bubble and in the early part of this century are moving firmly towards

profitability, with turnover in the third quarter of 2002 at $851 million and the

quarterly loss down to $34 million.

Ask yourself

• Have you thought through how your products and services could be sold
online?

• Check out the Amazon.com Web site to see the potential.