E-Commerce Applications

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The Challenge

The infrastructure on which an e-commerce site is built is critical to ensuring its security, dependability, and ability to handle sudden and/or seasonal spikes in demand. At the same time, e-commerce applications must be able to handle the business of commerce: accept and manage payments, manage the checkout pipeline, and pick, pack, and ship goods to customers. For many companies, these are not their core competencies. They’d prefer to focus on improving the online experience and driving qualified customer traffic rather than building and managing an e-commerce platform. An e-commerce solution provider should address these concerns in an easy-to-use and trustworthy manner.

When examining solutions for your e-commerce applications, consider the following questions:

• What payment solution will my customers prefer? Should I build my own or use an existing payment solution that they are familiar with and trust?
• Can I accept credit cards and alternative forms of payment?
• Can I transact with non-US customers?
• Can I change the payment processing pipeline to reflect my business needs beyond a simple buyer/seller model?
• Can I sell more than just tangible goods? Can I sell services or digital content?
• Do I have the resources to handle and control my own inventory?
• Do I have an easy means to advertise my goods and services?
• Do I have the ability to quickly build custom applications and host them on a proven, reliable platform?
• How can I clean my product catalog to remove duplicates and create metadata to improve search and discovery?

E-Commerce Applications Using AWS and Amazon

Amazon.com has the expertise and trust to help you deliver effective e-commerce solutions by providing the following services and technologies:

Amazon Web Services (AWS). If you have an existing e-commerce application or want to fully customize a new e-commerce site, AWS provides the infrastructure needed to deploy your application in the cloud. AWS provides businesses and website owners with massive compute power that easily scales as your business grows, handles your applications’ most demanding storage requirements, and delivers powerful database functionality that is both easy to use and flexible enough to support a wide variety of web applications. Learn more

Checkout by Amazon. Benefit from the secure payments and checkout experience used by tens of millions of customers on Amazon.com. Checkout by Amazon is a checkout solution that leverages Amazon’s e-commerce capabilities and offers your customers a familiar, trusted experience. Learn more

Amazon Simple Pay. Amazon Simple Pay is a set of payment-only products that allow your customers to use payment information from their Amazon.com account on your website. You don’t have to worry about obtaining and storing payment information and your customers can use a trusted and familiar payment service to pay for their goods or services. Learn more

Fulfillment by Amazon. You sell it, we ship it. Over more than a decade and millions of orders and customers, Amazon has created one of the most advanced fulfillment networks in the world and your business can now benefit from our expertise. When a customer places an order we pick, pack, and ship it. Learn more

Amazon WebStore. Amazon WebStore provides you with a branded e-commerce site backed by the support, selection, and expertise of Amazon. You can feel confident knowing that your WebStore is going to be up and running when customers visit your site. Better yet, WebStore is easy to set up and comes with a number of great marketing features so you can start selling in minutes. Learn more

Amazon Advertising Services. Amazon provides a host of options for placing ads for your goods and services on Amazon.com and securing paid placement for your goods and services. Learn more

Amazon Mechanical Turk. The Amazon Mechanical Turk service is a marketplace for work that gives your application programmatic access to human intelligence. This service can be used to seek “human judgment” from within your algorithms. For example, when you add an item to your product catalog, use Mechanical Turk to have workers classify the product (dress, accessory, shoes, jacket, blazer, etc.) and provide metadata to enable better search and discovery for your users. Learn more

Benefits at a Glance

Easy to use. Amazon e-commerce solutions are designed to be simple and to make it easy for you to get started. Whether you’re using turnkey website authoring tools or simple web services APIs, you’ll get a platform that makes it easy for you to deliver e-commerce applications for your customers.

Flexible. You can use one or all of the Amazon e-commerce technologies described above to meet your unique business needs and demands. Mix and match fulfillment, payment, advertising, and infrastructure services from Amazon and other vendors to build the right application for your business needs.

Cost-Effective. Amazon e-commerce solutions are low cost and affordable for businesses of all sizes.

Scalable, Reliable, and High-performance. Utilize Amazon’s battle-tested technologies and infrastructure, the virtual backbone of Amazon.com’s multi-billion dollar retail business that has been honed for over a decade.

Secure. AWS utilizes an end-to-end approach to secure and harden our infrastructure, including physical, operational, and software measures.

E-Commerce Application Resources