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Question: Discuss seven unique features of Amazon and implementation of seven unique features in Amazon. Answer: Introduction The term e-commerce became very popular with the emergence of new technologies, especially in the internet and computer network sectors. As e-commerce allows easy trading of goods or services over computer, it has become an essential part of most of the business structures. E-commerce organizations such as Amazon and e-Bay are doing exceptional business around the world and complementing traditional commercial buying and selling. The UK has the largest e-commerce market in the world that solely claimed almost 32 percent of European e-commerce sales in the year of 2013 (Azad et al. 2014). According to Huang and Benyoucef (2013), in the year of 2014, almost 80 percent online users accessed online shopping in the UK which was the highest online shopping penetration in Europe. Amazon leads the e-commerce market in the UK with a 16 percent market share while Tesco and eBay holds the second and third position having 9 percent and 8 percent market share respectively (Klaus 2013). Other majo r e-commerce websites of UK are Asos, Play.com, Next and John Lewis. This report will provide detailed information on the seven unique features of Amazon which has helped them to claim this top position in UK market. Seven Unique Features of Amazon Amazon has seven unique features in their website which are ubiquity, global reach, global standards, richness, interactivity, mass of information and customization (Huang and Benyoucef 2013). While some of these features are rightfully implemented and contributed in the success of Amazon, some features are implemented poorly. Figure 1: Seven Unique features of Amazon (Source: Huang and Benyoucef 2013) Ubiquity Ubiquity indicates that commercial transactions or any other activities related to a website are available everywhere such as workplaces, at home and on the mobile devices. Amazon.com is such a website that is not only available in pc platforms, but also available on all mobile platforms such as android, iphone and windows (Ritala et al. 2014). Besides, the connectivity of their server is so powerful that customers can access to the sites of Amazon at any time. This ubiquity or availability of Amazon is helping the consumers to reduce the transaction cost that is the cost of participating in the offline markets. Amazon is not only available in the UK, but also in countries like U.S., Canada, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, China and India (Klaus 2013). Therefore, the consumers can purchase goods from other countries too. Besides, the website of Amazon can stay connected to Facebook, Google+ and Twitter. Global reach Global reach of Amazon permits the consumers to execute commercial transactions from various countries that make this e-commerce site more convenient. Therefore, it can be said that the authority of the organization has several e-commerce merchants who are helping the website to become a popular and global market place (Berinsky et al. 2012). As Amazon.com is the ubiquity website, people in the whole world can go through this website and can carry out transactions without any obstacle. Global standards The standards of Amazon.com are higher than any other e-commerce site in the world which is shared by all the nations around the world. The global technical standards of Amazon are a great lower market entry cost that states the merchants must pay the costs of the goods that they bring to the market. Besides, the high standards of this site provides free search for all of their customers which means less effort to find the suitable products (Dong et al. 2013). In their website, Amazon has put the entire price and product related descriptions in a simpler and a accurate way. Richness The complexity and content of a message is known as the richness of that message. In the early days, conventional market had a great richness, as they were able to provide face-to-face services using aural and visual cue. This richness of the conventional markets helped the organizations to create a strong commercial environment. However, the e-commerce websites has brought a significant change in the traditional trade-off between richness and reach. According to Resca and Spagnoletti (2014), Amazon authorities believe that richness in the message depends on the amount of people they can reach. That means, the larger the people reached, the less rich the message. In any website of Amazon, detailed descriptions are provided for each product so that consumers can easily decide whether to buy it or not. Besides, Amazon also allows the sellers to communicate with the consumers to promote and explain the products to them. Interactivity Interactivity is one of the most important factors in e-commerce. For organizations like Amazon, it is difficult to implement face-to-face interaction with the consumers. Therefore, authority of Amazon is allowing their online merchants to attract the customer in the ways that are similar to face-to-face experience (Kousha and Thelwall 2015). Amazon website has developed a community that can do any announcement, enquiry and discussion between each other to understand the products properly. In this way, buyers and sellers can communicate with other in spite of staying at different countries. Density of information Information density allows the marketers to receive a huge amount of quality information on the products. Information density also allows to reduce the information cost and to increase the quality of the information to make it more relevant and useful (Skalicky 2013). Amazon websites are full of information such as detail outline of the product with its image so that consumers do not have to pay any costs to search the details from any other place. Customization Customization helps the merchants to target their marketing messages to the consumers based on their previous purchases and interests. Amazon follows this customization style to send marketing messages to different consumers who are the registered members in their system. Besides, Amazon also allows the consumers to create their wish list (Resca and Spagnoletti 2014). Wish list helps the merchants to understand the interests of the consumers therefore; they can send messages related to that wish list to the consumers. Implementation of seven unique features in Amazon Amazon authority and management has successfully implemented all the seven unique features in their websites to make it one of the most popular e-commerce sites in the world. However, it is seen that they failed to implement all of those features successfully (Muhammad et al. 2013). Some of those seven features are poorly implemented in Amazon websites. For example, ubiquity is implemented perfectly in Amazon websites because in many countries consumers can connect with each other and can buy products. Besides, consumers can also compare the products with other products to find out the best options for them. However, the interactivity is implemented poorly in Amazon websites. The chat provided in Amazon websites are not real time chat. The community is allowed to do announcements and enquiries between each other. However, sometimes consumers have to wait for the seller to do the reply which is considered as an inconvenience (Turban et al. 2015). Therefore, it is highly recommended that the authority of Amazon must enhance their system and allow the consumers to chat in a real time system like Facebook. In that way, they will be able to talk to sellers directly and will be able to get quick replies. However, it is also true that handling millions of consumers via chat is not an easy task to do. Therefore, neither the authority nor the advisers have any clue on this issue. Besides, the authority of Amazon must also think about global reach. It is true that Amazon facilities are directly available in 13 countries and last year the management recorded transaction from 185 countries (Resca an d Spagnoletti 2014). However, in the countries where the website is not directly available, the consumers had to wait longer to receive their products. Therefore, it can be said that the authority will also need to improve their global reach to hold their market position as e-commerce websites like eBay is already giving them tough competition. Conclusion In the conclusion it can be said that the main advantage of Amazon is there lower price structure. Amazon authority could keep the warehouse and staff costs lower which has helped them to offer products at a lower cost than other e-commerce websites. Second advantage is consumers can access to Amazon websites via any platform and from anywhere. However, Amazon is also facing some challenges and issues. E-commerce websites such as eBay and Tesco are slowly but steadily reducing the gap between them and Amazon. However, Amazon failed to improve their services in recent times. Therefore, they will have to work on their drawbacks to hold their position as a number one e-commerce website in UK. It is strongly recommended that they should improve their interaction system in order to communicate with their customers in a more frequent manner. They can also use social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter to communicate with existing and potential customers in different countries. References Azad, A.K.M., Islam, M.K. and Hoque, M.S., 2014. An analysis of popularity of Consumer to Consumer websites. International Journal of Advanced Computer Research, 4(3), p.828. Berinsky, A.J., Huber, G.A. and Lenz, G.S., . Evaluating online labor markets for experimental research: Amazon. com's Mechanical Turk. Political Analysis, 20(3), pp.351-368. Dong, R., O'Mahony, M.P., Schaal, M., McCarthy, K. and Smyth, B., 2013, October. Sentimental product recommendation. In Proceedings of the 7th ACM conference on Recommender systems (pp. 411-414). ACM. Huang, Z. and Benyoucef, M., 2013. 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