A Report on

Role of Management Information System in

E-Commerce
(Example – Amazon)

Prepared For: Ankur Sandal

Prepared By Amit Kumar ( A00106100)
Importance of MIS in E-commerce industry:
Various organizations try to attain competence by opting for an efficient and effective process to
collect personal information about the customers and their trends of purchasing, which helps to
attain a competitive advantage over the opponents of the E-commerce industry through
management and acquisition of data. A most vibrant tool to undergo this process of collecting
and managing data is MIS that aids as the key to success for an organization. MIS facilitates
decision making at the strategic and operational levels of an organization.

Amazon
(A Startup Company that uniquely fulfilled the dreams of customers
with the implementation of MIS)
Amazon, a proud initiative by Jeffrey Bezos, is one of those organizations that have changed
the definition of trade and commerce, which consequently led to a successful contribution
towards immense sales via the Internet. The company reflects the successful alignment of
information systems with the overall strategic goals and E-strategy by keeping its website
systems unique and separate from that of its order systems.

In a global context, namely Weber, 2010, E-strategies opted by the organization played a
decisive role in the development of the company to streamlined its management activities and
ensured that customers are offered distinct and diversified services for maximum profits.
The Uniqueness of the Amazon, Roles and Applications of
Information Systems

The uniqueness of Amazon, roles and applications of information system in the

company should be taken into consideration to characterize the reasons of the success
of the company.

Amazon emerged as an American multinational E-commerce company, that turned out

to be leading online retailer co and offers cloud computing services. For the overall
business strategy, Amazon opted for two technologies namely integration of Customer
relationship management and Information management.

The company has been exposed to serious threats regarding the storage and security
of the
Credit cards and debit cards information of more than 1000’s of customers a day. Thus,
the company got indulged in using the customer relationship management module
under enterprise resources management to store personalized information and
purchasing trends of its customers, which is integrated with the marketing and
Advertisement campaigns of the organization.

Sales Strategy:
The sales strategy of Amazon has been very unique that reflects its MIS. A transition
could be seen in the operations of the company from a single level sales strategy to
multi-level e-commerce strategy. The initial growth of the organization was
supported by business to consumer (B2C) models of selling and business to business
(B2B) mode of operations. The recent development in the E-commerce population has
boosted the interactions between the consumer and the business thus forcing Amazon
to give more priority and customization to its IT to value and respect reviews of the
customers as a part of their business operations.

Business Model:
The business model of Amazon reflects the management information systems that
involve browsing, management of accounts and the final step includes shopping.
Unique MIS and technology play a crucial role in each one of these stages.
Furthermore, elastic cloud computing has been yet another crucial web service offered
by Amazon. The objective of EC2 at Amazon has been to serve the developers who
work with web-scale computing. It offers the end-users complete control over the
computing actions and allows customers to use the computer environment of Amazon.
The pros of E2C computing at Amazon are its ability to save more time by ignoring the
needs of booting a new server. The most beneficial part of E2C is the feature of paying
only for the actual use and also helps the developers to customize their applications so
that the failure risk is being ignored.
Admittedly, S3 acts as a storage device for the usage of the internet in the E2C
application of Amazon. The interface helps the end-users to use save, retrieve, use any
volume of data from any location irrelevant to the time.

Output:
The Management Information System incorporated by Amazon was a successful
attempt to link the information system and its development with organizational goals
using logical analysis, which regularly generated structured reports on various internal
aspects for the company. The main tasks behind this initiative are to assess different
operations and create a report based on it. MIS of the company is a set of interrelated
machines, which are organized in a hierarchical structure, covering every aspect of the
company from top to bottom.
It forms the first, rarely the second level of information system and performs its normal
function and transmits information machines of the second level. At this level, the data
is used for optimization calculations. Thus, the management information system
consistently implements the principles of unity and organization of information through
the use of technical means of collection, storage, processing and transmission of
information in conjunction with the use of analytical methods of mathematical statistics
and models of forecasting and analytical calculations.

Case Studies:
In this era of globalization, Amazon has become the biggest online store across the globe,
defeating its competitors. This can be illustrated by considering certain case studies of
technology.

Case Study 1- Amazon.com was the first-ever organization to introduce a service named as the
customer reviews on any product to gain a competitive advantage, even though sometimes the
reviews were negative. A case study was that the producers initially opposed the introduction of
this feature. They thought that the introduction of this option could affect the sales negatively in
the presence of a large number of negative reviews. However, the analysis of information based
on MIS showed that the reviews only increased sales, and the problem was solved, which gave
the company a competitive advantage at that time.

Case Study 2- Another case study of management of the company deals with the question of
specialization in which managers were dealing only with the sale of the books. Instead, the
organization opted for a decision to diversify the activities based on the MIS to acquire a better
position int the market over competitors. Today, Amazon sells a variety of products, including
appliances, DVDs, and even digital music.

Moving ahead towards management in the Amazon, it needs to be agreed upon that the
situation was very difficult at the beginning. The company believed that success could be
achieved only with small groups of workers. That’s why the founder did not use complex vertical
hierarchy in management. Everything has been built on the work of small groups until the
current moment.

An important role in the successful sale rates of Amazon was played by the marketing team.
The management information system has helped to build a sales system, in which ordinary
people themselves started to promote products of Amazon. The owner of any website can sell
products of Amazon through their own resource, receiving a good amount of sales percentage.

Reference: 1) https://thesisleader.com/essays/amazon-management-information-system/
2) http://www.questjournals.org/jrbm/papers/vol4-issue11/B4111117.pdf