The race to soak up as much of the market as possible has been highly intensified by the process of eCommerce. Some companies choose to base their entire operations on the Internet, for example, Amazon.com. On the other hand there are already brick and mortar storefronts that also wish to deal business on the Internet, for example, Barnes & Noble. These two companies run on a completely different structure and business model, but have one thing in common; they sell books (and much more, but I will only concentrate on the book aspect of operations). Amazon.com had the head start in the eCommerce division, but Barnes & Noble had been in operation for almost a century.

In 1994 Jeff Bezos in his garage in Seattle, Washington founded Amazon.com. To this day, it continues to run as a virtual organization having not one physical storefront. This is how they keep their overhead and inventory costs down, that leads to savings for the consumer. With a total of 7600 employees, Amazon.com was first to successfully conduct operations on the Internet. Also, they were the first enterprise to sell traditional consumer goods online which opened the eyes to other industries wi

On the other hand there is Barnes & Noble, a century old storefront on Fifth Avenue that was bought out by Leonard Riggio in 1971. Riggio, being an entrepreneur looked to expand his business by merging with other bookstores to create a storefront, which can have virtually any book. B&N operates more than a 1000 stores and has 27,000 employees. B&N are the first to offer such a broad selection of books under one roof, which is why they are considered a superstore with almost 150,000 titles. Which has led to high inventory costs and high turnover rates. This is why it has led Barnes & Noble to conduct business over the Internet. They take a great pride in allowing the customer to relax, have some coffee and sit down with a book before they actually purchase it.

Amazon.com relies extremely heavily upon the Internet, if the system is down and they cannot get up and running due to problems or hackers their entire business is down. They have had a couple of time where hackers have managed to bring the entire site from completely stopping all transactions for hours at a time. Unlike Amazon.com, B&N have a back up, which is their traditional stores. If their site had been down for some reason, they would not lose their sales entirely; they have 1000+ stores to rely on. B&N has the advantage of not basing their entire operations on the Internet. Another important aspect of eCommerce is getting people to visit your site. At both companies, they have gone into partnership with other websites to have links to their respective sites. For example, Amazon.com has setup banners on other websites and if they track a sale that was made from that banner, they would give that site 15% of that sale. Although it seems like a good way of promoting ones site, it can be very costly.

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Approximate Word count = 1208
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)