Do you remember where you were when you heard wonderful, life-changing news? It was maybe 1996 or so that The Wall Street Journal® article that presented the news to me came out. I remember where I was — living in a temporary apartment just before the big move into a fabulous hilltop villa overlooking the San Fernando Valley in California. The front page article told about this little company with a funny name. People were buying books like crazy from them; they were growing like a weed. I studied every word of that article. This was something I had to look into because I had been marketing on the Internet since 1994, and this article described some magic called Amazon.com®. Over the next few years, Amazon® would take an inordinate role in my life. I visited them for the first time around 1999. What a funky company: One side of their building was a hospital. Across the hall was reception, and employees’ dogs wandered the corridors. They even sold doggy treats at the in-house espresso bar.
The founder, Jeff Bezos, worked from a desk made from an old door placed on sawhorses. Everything was inexpensive, informal, and funky.
But Amazon was not a flippant dot-com here today and gone tomorrow. The people I visited were serious, and the smartest of the smart. They asked penetrating questions of my startup and were cautious as well as astute.
We did our deal, one of several, and by then, I had already bought thousands of dollars worth of books from them. Then, it was cookware, accessories, and electronics. I followed Amazon as they went into the auction business, the used-book business, and the fulfillment business.
Years later, the scene has changed. I still buy books and electronics from Amazon, but I do so much more.
For years, I struggled with the simple task of selling merchandise and having someone reliable ship it for me. Amazon fills that role now. They are masters of getting the goods out the door in a matter of hours. They rush whatever my customers order and never lose a thing. This is no small matter, and not many companies are masters of this the way Amazon is — maybe nobody on Earth fulfills better than they do. So, they do all my fulfillment for the products I sell.
They have always run an amazingly reliable and scalable server farm. They have to serve millions of customers at the height of the holiday rush hour, and seldom does their site even slow down.
So now, I use their servers — their S3SM service — to serve videos and audios to the crowds that visit my sites, such as www.MortgageRelief-Formula.com. This S3 can show a million people the same video at the same time. You do not need to burden your own servers with this, and it costs peanuts compared to having your own computers set up to do the same thing.
Amazon’s cleverness extends to other areas, and I use many of them. My programmers in one of my businesses are just now setting up a system that uses their database to store data and deliver it on-demand to my customers.
How many thousands of businesses has Amazon spawned that would not be providing a good living for entrepreneurs if Amazon had never existed? One startup I know built their entire business by selling on Amazon, and now, author Sharon L. Cohen, with her book Amazon Income: How ANYONE of Any Age, Location, and/or Background Can Build a Highly Profitable Online Business with Amazon, has turned me on to many other startups and business owners who are depending on Amazon and using Amazon to build their business in ways I never dreamed.
The press knows that eBay® has an interesting story here or there, such as an auction for babies, or the sale of a country (just kidding). But the real action often takes place away from the public eye. That is the case with Amazon. Cohen has revealed a most amazing story, a story of thousands of entrepreneurs quietly using Amazon to make money; a story that is still young and still affords a ground floor opportunity for the rest of us. We can take a good idea and, with Amazon’s help, turn it into money. I love the thorough overview of the business possibilities and the case studies that Cohen shows us, and I think you will find it a thrilling ride with numerous opportunities for you. Thank you, Sharon, for writing this book.
Richard Geller, CEO
DesiredResultsPublishing, LLC
Fairfax, Virginia
