The management of e-commerce strategies for gaining and sustaining competitive advantage in the online bookselling industry: the case of Amazon.com

Many industry sectors have adopted the internet as a medium of communications between suppliers and customers. Yet few have been able to create, let alone sustain, a competitive advantage using e-commerce as a basis for transacting business. The bookselling industry has been at the forefront of developing business models to seek competitive advantage via internet applications. Amazon.com were the first movers in this new method of transacting business and were able to build a significant lead in the market. However, since 2000 the company has had to reassess its operations after seeing its competitive advantage eroded by a combination of debt financing and an increasingly coherent response from rivals. This paper investigates the management of e-commerce strategies and the efficacy of the buisness model developed by Amazon.com and calls on theoretical positions from the fields of strategic management and economics to critically assess the sustainability of the company's competitive advantage.