Amazon.com 2006 Annual Report Download - page 13

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We fulfill customer orders in a number of ways, including through the U.S. and international fulfillment
centers and warehouses that we operate; through fulfillment centers operated under co-sourcing arrangements,
including our fulfillment center supporting www.amazon.co.jp; through outsourced fulfillment providers,
including our fulfillment providers supporting www.amazon.ca; and through other third-party fulfillment
arrangements. We operate customer service centers globally, which are supplemented by several co-sourcing
customer service arrangements with third parties. See Item 2 of Part I, “Properties,” for additional information
about fulfillment centers and customer service locations.
Services
Merchant Services
Amazon Enterprise Solutions offers third party retailers e-commerce expertise, proven technology, and
operational infrastructure to enable third party e-commerce businesses operating under their own brand name and
website address (e.g. www.target.com). In addition, we generate revenue through co-branded credit card
agreements and marketing and promotional services, such as online advertising.
Developer Services
We offer a variety of web services that provide developers with direct access to Amazon.com’s robust
technology platform and enable them to build innovative applications on their own. These services include:
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), which provides a simple web services interface for
storing and retrieving data from anywhere on the web;
• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides a scalable up and down virtual
computing environment, allowing developers to use web service interfaces to requisition machines for
use and load them with their custom application environment, making web-scale computing easier for
developers;
• Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), which offers a reliable, highly scalable hosted queue for
storing messages as they travel between computers;
• Amazon Mechanical Turk, which provides a web service for computers to integrate a network of
humans directly into their processes;
• Amazon E-Commerce Service (ECS), which exposes our product data and e-commerce functionality to
allow developers, web site owners and merchants to leverage the data and functionality that we use to
power our own e-commerce businesses; and
• Alexa’s Web Services, which offer a platform for creating innovative web solutions and services based
on Alexa’s vast repository of information about the web.
Marketing and Promotion
Our marketing strategy is designed to increase customer traffic to our websites, drive awareness of products
and services we offer, promote repeat purchases, develop incremental product and service revenue opportunities,
and strengthen and broaden the Amazon.com brand name. We believe our most effective marketing efforts result
from our focus on continuously improving the customer experience, which drives word-of-mouth promotion and
repeat customer visits. We also deliver personalized Web pages and services and employ a variety of media,
business development activities, and promotional methods. We employ various means of advertising, which
consist primarily of online advertising, including through our Associates program, sponsored search, portal
advertising, e-mail campaigns, and other initiatives. Our Associates program directs customers to our websites by
enabling independent websites to make millions of products available to their audiences with fulfillment
performed by us or third parties. We pay commissions to participants in our Associates program for click-
through customer referrals and customer referrals resulting in product sales, subject to the terms of the specific
commission agreement.
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