"Business the Amazon.com Way" (first edition) was published in 1999, at the height of dot-com mania, when Amazon had 1,000 employees and was trading at $209 a share. So it's hopelessly dated. The book might still have merit if it included a good history of Amazon's early years, but the information on Amazon's foundation and early growth is sketchy. This book was aimed at aspiring internet entrepreneurs, touting the endless possibilities for business on the web and presenting Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos as a shining example of e-commerce success. "Business the Amazon.com Way" is a simplistic handbook for web businesses more than a study of Amazon, and it looks even more naïve in retrospect, considering the dot-com crash.
Author Rebecca Saunders catalogs the reasons for Amazon's success that could be applied to your internet start-up: know your customers, update pages frequently, link from related sites, have clear long-term goals, brand the site, be customer-centric, staffing and recruiting, a distribution plan for fast order fulfillment and delivery, frugality, state-of-the-art technology, constant innovation, continual growth. And we get a general idea of how Jeff Bezos and the early Amazonians went about accomplishing these things. But it's pretty simple stuff. I don't think "Business the Amazon.com Way" did anything more than state the obvious, in limited detail, in 1999. If you're looking for a primer on Amazon's early years, Robert Spector's "Amazon.com: Get Big Fast" (2000) is equally enthusiastic and uncritical, but it is much more useful.
