Amazon.com 2013 Annual Report Download - page 4

The Great Gatsby, which has already sold 100,000 copies. Whispersync for Voice allows customers to switch
seamlessly back and forth between reading a book on their Kindle and listening to the corresponding Audible
book on their smart phone. The Wall Street Journal called Whispersync for Voice “Amazon’s new killer app for
books.” If you haven’t already, I recommend you give it a try – it’s fun and expands the amount of time you have
available to read.
Fresh Grocery
After trialing the service for five years in Seattle (no one accuses us of a lack of patience), we expanded
Amazon Fresh to Los Angeles and San Francisco. Prime Fresh members pay $299 a year and receive same-day
and early morning delivery not only on fresh grocery items but also on over 500,000 other items ranging from
toys to electronics to household goods. We’re also partnering with favorite local merchants (the Cheese Store of
Beverly Hills, Pike Place Fish Market, San Francisco Wine Trading Company, and many more) to provide the
same convenient home delivery on a great selection of prepared foods and specialty items. We’ll continue our
methodical approach – measuring and refining Amazon Fresh – with the goal of bringing this incredible service
to more cities over time.
Amazon Web Services
AWS is eight years old, and the team’s pace of innovation is actually accelerating. In 2010, we launched 61
significant services and features. In 2011, that number was 82. In 2012, it was 159. In 2013: 280. We’re also
expanding our geographic footprint. We now have 10 AWS regions around the world, including the East Coast of
the U.S., two on the West Coast, Europe, Singapore, Tokyo, Sydney, Brazil, China, and a government-only
region called GovCloud. We have 26 availability zones across regions and 51 edge locations for our content
distribution network. The development teams work directly with customers and are empowered to design, build,
and launch based on what they learn. We iterate continuously, and when a feature or enhancement is ready, we
push it out and make it instantly available to all. This approach is fast, customer-centric, and efficient – it’s
allowed us to reduce prices more than 40 times in the past 8 years – and the teams have no plans to slow down.
Employee Empowerment
We challenge ourselves to not only invent outward facing features, but also to find better ways to do things
internally – things that will both make us more effective and benefit our thousands of employees around the
world.
Career Choice is a program where we pre-pay 95% of tuition for our employees to take courses for in-
demand fields, such as airplane mechanic or nursing, regardless of whether the skills are relevant to a career at
Amazon. The goal is to enable choice. We know that for some of our fulfillment center employees, Amazon will
be a career. For others, Amazon might be a stepping stone on the way to a job somewhere else – a job that may
require new skills. If the right training can make the difference, we want to help.
The second program is called Pay to Quit. It was invented by the clever people at Zappos, and the Amazon
fulfillment centers have been iterating on it. Pay to Quit is pretty simple. Once a year, we offer to pay our
associates to quit. The first year the offer is made, it’s for $2,000. Then it goes up one thousand dollars a year
until it reaches $5,000. The headline on the offer is “Please Don’t Take This Offer.” We hope they don’t take the
offer; we want them to stay. Why do we make this offer? The goal is to encourage folks to take a moment and
think about what they really want. In the long-run, an employee staying somewhere they don’t want to be isn’t
healthy for the employee or the company.
A third inward innovation is our Virtual Contact Center. It’s an idea we started a few years back and have
continued to grow with terrific results. Under this program, employees provide customer service support for
Amazon and Kindle customers while working from home. This flexibility is ideal for many employees who,
perhaps because they have young children or for another reason, either cannot or prefer not to work outside the
home. Our Virtual Contact Center is our fastest growing “site” in the U.S., operating in more than ten states
today. This growth will continue as we hope to double our state footprint in 2014.