Invent and Wander

experience for customers also happens to be a huge driver of variable cost productivity: eliminating mistakes and errors at their root. Every year that’s gone by since Amazon.com’s founding, we’ve done a better and better job of eliminating errors, and this past year was our best ever. Eliminating the root causes of errors saves us money and saves customers time.

Our consumer franchise is our most valuable asset, and we will nourish it with innovation and hard work

As my last example, I’ll just point out that one of the most important things we’ve done to improve convenience and experience for customers also

regular search on any product in your order. When you get to that product’s detail page, a link to your order will be at the top of the page.

We built a new feature called Look Inside the Book. Customers can view large high-resolution images of not only the front cover of a book but also the back cover, index, table of contents, and a reasonable sample of the inside pages. They can Look Inside the Book before making a buying decision. It’s available on over two hundred thousand of our millions of titles (as a point of comparison, a typical book superstore carries about one hundred thousand titles

We’ve dramatically improved customer self-service capabilities. Customers can now easily find, cancel, or modify their own orders. To find an order, just make sure you are signed in and recognized by the site, and do a regular

seven times the selection you’re likely to find in a big-box electronics store), we’ve tripled our kitchen selection (you’ll find all the best brands), we’ve launched computer and magazine subscriptions stores, and we’ve added selection with strategic partners such as Target and Circuit City.

We’ve improved convenience with features like Instant Order Update, which warns you if you’re about to buy the same item twice (people are busy—they forget

You should know that our commitment to the first two pillars remains as strong as ever.

We now have more than forty-five thousand items in our electronics store (about

Until July, Amazon.com had been primarily built on two pillars of customer experience: selection and convenience. In July, as I already discussed, we added a third customer experience pillar: relentlessly
lowering prices

We intend to build the world’s most customer-centric company. We hold as axiomatic that customers are perceptive and smart, and that brand image follows reality and not the other way around. Our customers tell us that they choose Amazon.com and tell their friends about us because of the selection, ease-of-use, low prices, and service that we deliver.

But there is no rest for the weary. I constantly remind our employees to be afraid, to wake up every morning terrified

We intend to build the world’s most customer-centric company. We hold as axiomatic that customers are perceptive and smart, and that brand image follows reality and not the other way around. Our customers tell us that they choose Amazon.com and tell their friends about us because of the selection, ease-of-use, low prices, and service that we deliver.

But there is no rest for the weary. I constantly remind our employees to be afraid, to wake up every morning terrified. Not of our
competition, but of our customers. Our customers have made our business what it is, they are the ones with whom we have a relationship, and they are the ones to whom we owe a great obligation. And we consider them to be loyal to us—right up until the second that someone else offers them a better service

colleagues should be able to create a readable narrative when they pitch an idea. “We don’t do PowerPoint (or any other slide-oriented) presentations at Amazon,” he wrote in a recent shareholder letter. “Instead, we write narratively structured six-page memos. We silently read one at the beginning of each meeting in a kind of study hall