The rise of an online superstore
Amazon is an operation born and raised online. It speaks fluent “onlinese,” and in fact has written large chunks of the dictionary. It is the biggest, fastest and most innovative force shaping the way the world has been conducting commerce in the past 20 years, and it’s seared into the collective mind as the main deliverer of ecommerce Gospel. Now a mature 20-year-old juggernaut, the Seattle store isAmazon’s first brick-and-mortar consumer presence.
From the get-go, the ecommerce giant never had the privilege of meeting clients on the sales floor, watching firsthand the effect of sales and promotions, rearranging displays according to changing tastes. But it had something so much better -- it had data. Big data. Ridiculous amounts of data.