Diffusion Theory

   

 Amazon was founded on July 5, 1994. When it began it was just an online bookstore. However, Jeff Bezos, the CEO at the time stated that the company was more than just an online bookstore. He wanted it to be viewed as a new technology for the public to use that made online shopping easier. Multiple people claimed that Amazon would fail because there were already established bookstores that people could go to in person and buy books. They did not believe that the internet would be a tool worth utilizing at the time. In the year 1996 Amazon had its early adopters. Based on the Diffusion Theory this group of people is some of the first people to try a product. During this time the product may still be in the development stages, so all of the aspiring aspects it may have in the future are not there yet. In 1996 Amazon had 180,000 customers with active accounts on the website. These people are the early adopters because Amazon was not at its full potential yet. It was still only a bookstore with so much more to accomplish. Throughout the rest of the '90s, the company continued to flourish, but these were still early adopters because they were still dealing with the primitive stage of the company. They began to start selling other items on their website, and this earned them $2.76 billion by the year 2000. 

    2000-2016 is when the early and late majority came around. Amazon had stepped outside of its comfort zone and began offering more services to consumers. For example, it came out with its cloud service AWS, and it started selling the Kindle. It also started creating plans like Amazon Prime with its customers to develop a better relationship with its customers. This means customers started to feel some loyalty towards the brand, and they began drifting away from Amazon's competitors, like eBay. This was the beginning of Amazon's online empire. Amazon had 180 million active customers. At least, 10 million of them were active in the customer rewards program. This growth was possible during this time because the internet was not as new anymore. People were less suspicious of it, and it began to become a part of everyday life. Malls and other in-person locations would begin to lose business because of Amazon's growth.

    The pandemic that took place in 2020 caused a lot of people to stay indoors. The fear of getting sick kept people inside. How would people continue to go shopping? These fears during the pandemic accumulated Amazon many more customers. They were still open and provided a safe option for groceries and other products. It had over 300 million customers active on its site. These are the laggards. The pandemic allowed Amazon to gain a larger mass. However, there was not really an innovation during this period that gathered these customers. Amazon was a convenient service for anybody during this time, so people were forced to adapt. Now, we are at the long tail, because there are not many new innovations they can do to draw in more customers.  

Sources: 

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Amazoncom

https://fabric.inc/blog/amazon-grow-faster-ebay/#:~:text=Amazon's%20focus%20on%20optimizing%20the,massive%20base%20of%20loyal%20customers.

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-prime-10-million-members-morningstar-2013-3#:~:text=Prime%20members%20are%20great%20customers,182%20million%20active%20customer%20base.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations#cite_note-FOOTNOTERogers1962150-3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_adopter

https://s2.q4cdn.com/299287126/files/doc_financials/annual/00ar.pdf

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