Book Review: The everything store. The book about how amazon.com became a multi trillion dollar business

I was in Manchester to give a sales training recently and as my personal tradition i visit two places in every city i enter: coffee shops and bookstores

I visited Waterstones bookstore and bought a copy of the book above ‘THE EVERYDAY STORE’ for approximately ￡10 (N10,000) as you can see from the beautiful picture i took of it in my study at home. The book was so good i bought the digital copy for ￡7.99 (N8,000) as well so that when i am on the move i can read it on my ipad.

Truly the price of a book and the cost of taking time to read it, both have asymmetrical relationship to the benefits you’ll get from the book. I am reminded of what the Billionaire Charlie Munger said after making money from an idea in got from a newsletter

“Yes. I read Barron’s for fifty years. In fifty years I found one investment opportunity in Barron’s, out of which I made about $80 million with almost no risk. I took the $80 million and gave it to Li Lu, who turned it into $400-500 million. So I have made $400-500 million out of reading Barron’s newsletter for fifty years“

Here are the lessons and highlights i got from the book

1. On Customer Obsession: “His customer-service department tracked two important metrics: average talk time (the amount of time an employee spent on the phone with a customer) and contacts per order (the number of times a purchase necessitated a customer phone call or e-mail). Bezos demanded that his staff reduce both” Notice one of his metrics was not how many products they sold! Because he knew that if he could get the complains down, the clients will leave good review, tell their friends and their friends will shop with amazon.com. I believe that if you focus on the right value adding metrics on your job or business the rest will take care of themselves.
2. On Network Effects: Network effects means that a product or service become increasingly more valuable as more people use them. Your phone is valuable to you because other people have a telephone so your phone has network effect, social media platforms are valuable to you because your clients and friends use them, zoom or amazon is more valuable because a lot of people us them. So amazon realize that for it to have network effects it must have amazing service which will fuel word of mouth for them
3. On The Power Of The Media Or PR: “Amazon was featured on the front-page of WSJ (Wall Street Journal) article, ‘How Wall Street Whiz Found a Niche Selling Books on the Internet,’ and Bezos had his first stippled-and-hatched portrait in the country’s largest financial newspaper. The number of orders each day immediately doubled. The world now knew about amazon”
4. On Partnerships: “That summer, the company launched what could be considered its first big innovation: allowing other websites to collect a fee when they sent customers directly to Amazon to buy a book. Amazon gave these approved sites an 8 percent commission for the referral. The Associates program wasn’t exactly the first of its kind, but it was the most prominent and it helped spawn a multibillion-dollar-a-year industry called affiliate marketing. It also allowed Amazon, very early on, to extend its reach across the Web to other sites, entrenching it in advance of the looming competition.”
5. On Having Coffee With Your Mentor Or Coach: One saturday morning Jeff Bezos had coffee inside a Barnes & Noble store with his retail mentor Jim Sinegal the Billionaire founder of COSTCO. I like two of the advice Jim gave Jeff

Hope you enjoyed this

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