A good example of an international Internet commerce company that has made great strides even through the dot-com failures is Amazon.com. While the company's stock price has fluctuated over its active lifetime, the company itself has steadily trended toward growth because its concept and its growth pattern seem to have been well thought through by its founder.
Alazon.com began hn the early 1990s as a warehouser/online retailer of popular books and gradually added additional books to its inventory. In 1995, it was being publicized as having opened a "million-dollar bookstore" on the Internet (Amazon.com, 1995, p. 71). In 1999, when the dot-com crash was in full cry, The Wall Street Journal explained that venture capitalists, which had fed the dot-com boom, were looking for the next Amazon but that cash was not going to be as freely and easily dispensed as it had just been (Anders, 1999, p. A1).
Meanwhile, however, Amazon had steadily grown its business, selling not only books but also accessories of all kinds--even, at one point, cars, although that decision was reversed. Saunders attributes Amazon's survival of the dot-com problems to the fact that the company evolved from a purely "click" to a "brick and click" business model (2002, p. 31). That is, it used the Internet as a support mechanism for a fairly standard mail-order shipping operation. The Internet was a tool, not an end in itself--a lesson that many dot-coms did not learn.
Amazon.com did not and does not require fewer physical, financial, and human resources than traditional retailers. It does reallocate them, however. What is not spent on literal window dressing it must spend on shipping personnel and warehousing. That is because operations all take place in the background, out of sight of the customers, who want one thing only: results in the form of timely deliveries.
Amazon.com benefited from being among the first frankly Internet-based businesses, but it dea...