Lessons From Amazon Ecommerce Business Disruption

You’re now listening to Hack And Grow Rich with Shaahin Cheyene and his co-host Bart Baggett. In the old days of the internet we tend to forget, especially people who are my age. I’m 46 now and I remember the first days of the internet. Younger people might not remember it. You didn’t know who to trust. You felt more secure going to a brick and mortar store, where you could touch and feel the product and buy it.

You didn’t know if you bought it on a website if they would take your credit card number, if you’d never see the product, if you’d see it in three weeks, all those variables have been taken out. So again Jeff Bezos is being proactive with his customer service. The best customer service is done before the consumer ever even buys the product. He made sure that the products on the site were of high enough quality.

He made sure that there was plenty of selection and most importantly the lowest, most competitive prices which he realized was very important. People wanted to save money now. From a customer service standpoint what Jeff Bezos did was he said, you know what, we’re going to let the customer handle their own returns. Insane! Nobody had ever done that before. He said, yeah, we believe that customers can handle most of their issues and they don’t need us and besides the cost for us to pay a representative whatever it is $5, $10 an hour on the end of the other phone to deal with a customer for an hour or two may be more than the cost of the goods.

So what what he did is he created easy returns. If you go onto amazon to this day you’ll see easy returns. If you buy something and you don’t like it, you go into the app or you go into the back end and you click return. It says, what’s your reason? You say other you’re good to go, they refund it right back to your card. In many instances you don’t even need to send it back. So it’s a form of efficiency.