Q2a. Why has it been a successful site? How does the purchase of a book work?

Q2. Visit the famous online store front at http://www.amazon.com
Q2a. Why has it been a successful site? How does the purchase of a book work?

Answer:

Matt (2007) lists that Amazon.com has been a successful site because...

1. Teams in Amazon.com are small. They are assigned authority and empowered to solve a problem as a service in anyway they see fit.
2. Work from the customer backward.
3. Force developers to focus on value delivered to the customer instead of building technology first and then figuring how to use it.
4. Start with a press release of what features the user will see and work backwards to check that you are building something valuable.
5. End up with a design that is as minimal as possible.
6. Create self-healing, self-organizing lights out operations.
7. Open up your system with APIs and you’ll create an ecosystem around your application.
8. Keep things simple by making sure there are no hidden requirements and hidden dependencies in the design.
9. There’s bound to be problems with anything that produces hype before real implementation.
10. Use measurement and objective debate to separate the good from the bad.
11. Getting rid of the influence of the HiPPO’s, the highest paid people in the room.
12. Create a frugal culture.
13. Have a way to rollback if an update doesn’t work.
14. Look for three things in interviews: enthusiasm, creativity, competence.
15. Embrace innovation.
16. Everyone must be able to experiment, learn, and iterate.

I agree with Matt, especially on the points 3, 5 and 13. From my experience, many developers use the new technologies to show off. Yet, in fact, the new technologies do not fit the users' requirement. As a result, the project may fail. Next, Point 5 sounds good. When I handled Change Control in the past, the more changes resulted in the higher failure rate. Also, the more changes make users more difficult to get used. Hence, "End up with a design that is as minimal as possible". Finally, Rollback is very important for every project, website or system, since it can minimize the impact of the failure so that the risk can be managed.

About the purchase of a book, Amazon.com offers One-Click Ordering Technique to let customers make online purchases with a single click, with the payment information needed to complete the purchase already entered by the user previously. The customers order things in Amazon.com by simply One-Click rather than using Shopping Cart Software. Amazon.com has patented this Technique since 1999. (Wikipedia, 2009)

Reference:

1. Matt (2007). "Secrets to Amazon's Success". 37signals LLC., Retrieved Mar-14th-2009 from URL - http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/600-secrets-to-amazons-success
2. Wikipedia (2009). "1-Click". Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia, Retrieved Mar-14th-2009 from URL -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click