The trick Jeff Bezos used to make Amazon succeed in its early years

Labatella

May 02, 2021, 11:57 am

Many met Jeff Bezos and Amazon when the site was positioned as one of the largest (if not the most well-known) virtual stores in the world. However, more than two decades ago, Amazon was little more than a small library with a big dream and a road ahead. And while it was difficult to grow with this small industry at the time, Bezos found a way to manage it and even cheated a little along the way.

to GQ Mexico

In 1996, Amazon was a bookstore that began to explore the online market and sought to attract customers to this new way of purchasing its products. Of course, at the time, the sophisticated distribution and delivery system you have today did not exist, and everything worked differently. According to a source close to the company, it worked this way: Once it got customers’ orders, the company ordered the books from a distributor or publisher, who delivered them to an Amazon warehouse in Seattle, and then they were packaged and stored. Shipped. On average, this took five days after he ordered it and if they pay more, they’ll arrive after a day or two (a bit as it’s still kept).

So, while the traditional store would only sell the products in its warehouse, Amazon was receiving payments and orders even before it asked for them from distributors, which wasn’t very practical, but it achieved what Jeff Bezos wanted to promote: that the store got more addresses than Any other library in the world, and discounts from 10 to 30 percent. For the latter, Amazon needed to strike a good deal with the wholesalers in order to get a better price. According to sources, at that time, at least 10 books were required to be ordered from distributors, the problem was that Amazon did not fulfill 10 orders per day or did not always have to sell only 10 books, which was a problem, since it would have to Waiting for the company to get the necessary volume of orders, which takes longer to deliver to users.

The Jeff Bezos hoax

This is where Jeff Bezos’ “trap” comes in, or a simple trick that helped solve this problem, which influenced the future of shopping for change. The man explained this in a 1999 interview with Wired: “We found a flaw. The systems (from distributors) were programmed in such a way that they didn’t have to receive 10 books, you only had to order 10 books. Then we found an unknown book about lichens they had on their system but it didn’t return. We started ordering just one book we want and nine copies of the Lichen Book. They would send the book we needed and a note saying, “Sorry, but we’re out of the Lichen Book.” One of these days they’ll leave us all these lichen books in our front yard.

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