Amazon.

com
by Steven Morrison
 Contents
 Intro to Amazon
 Amazon in Scotland
 Dynamic Campaigns
 Extreme Programming
 What is Amazon?
 “World's biggest catalogue”
 Third party retailer
 Allowing sellers to sell through Amazon.com
 Technology and platform provider
 AWS
 S3
 EC2
 Why Amazon is Successful
 We catch the “Tail”
 Product range
 Centralised inventory
 Focus on the customer
 The Tail
 The average Barnes and Noble has 130,000
books on their shelves
 Over 50% of Amazon's book sales are outside
the top 130,000 titles
 Product Range
 Mission: Be the place you come to find and
discover anything you might want to buy online
 US site has 35 product categories
 Product Range
 Mission: Be the place you come to find and
discover anything you might want to buy online
 US site has 35 product categories
 Centralised Inventory
 Don’t need 1 per store to be in stock, just 1
 Less inventory risk
 Less capital tied up
 Cheaper shelves to carry broad stock
 Cost advantage vs. prime location
 Amazon Development Centre
 Data Factory
Scotland
 Improving data quality
 Automating as much as possible
 Humans do the rest
 Search Suggestions
 Associate search terms with relevant products
 Dynamic Campaigns
 Merchandise to customers
 2 new secrets projects for 2007
 Dynamic Campaigns
 When you go to a shop, you expect to be sold to
 Special offers
 Impulse items at the checkouts
 Cross-selling and up-selling by clerks
 On a website, the same techniques are used
 Dynamic Campaigns
 Each page is split into slots
 Dynamic Campaigns: Aims
 Customised store for each customer
 99.9% of home pages loaded under 2s
 Create interesting and compelling content
 Dynamic Campaigns: Data
 60 million products
 Some have little or no data
 Others have masses
 Spiderman 2 DVD detail page is over 8 foot long
 Prices, reviews, related items, product details, ...
 60 million customers
 Purchases, reviews, wish lists, browsing history, ...
 Over 100 requests a second
Dynamic Campaigns: Strategies
 A strategy defines an approach for creating
content to show the customer in a single slot
 Where to look for products
 What to exclude
 What content to display
Dynamic Campaigns: Trade-offs
 Pick one of the following to concentrate on
 Data quality
 Data cost
 Sacrifice the other
 Are they any good?
 Did a campaign lead to more profit?
 We can attribute sales to links that a customer
clicked on.
 But would they have still bought something if we
weren't there?
 Did we poach traffic from another part of the page?
Dynamic Campaigns: A/B Testing
 Randomly assign visitors to treatments as they
arrive
 Measure differences between sales and
customer activity by treatment
 Use statistics to identify significant changes
 Challenges:
 Differences between treatments have to be
minimal
 A huge quantity of data is required to detect subtle
effects
 Extreme Programming
 Software engineering
methodology
 Embraces shifting
requirements
 Listen well to customer
 Feedback quickly and often
 Keep things simple
 Don't over-engineer for the
(potential) future
 Change things incrementally
http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Extreme_programming

 Make change possible

 XP – Iterations
 1 to 4 weeks long
 Set of stories chosen by the customer
 Chosen from backlog, bug list, new features list
 Actual work to be done is planned just before
the iteration
 Release at end of iteration
 XP – Coding and Designing
 Test driven development
 Pair programming
 “Premature optimisation is the root of all
evil” 1
 Designing for the future is discouraged
 Refactor aggressively

1
Tony Hoare
Questions?