Introduction
This essay described the economic, political/legal, cultural and trade environment of e-commerce in the world and their impact on Amazon’s international marketing mix. Although the overall environment is favorable to the development of Amazon, Amazon needs to continue to adapt to changes in the environment and adjust marketing strategy. And then it will have a long-term development.
The impact of economic environment on Amazon’s international marketing mix
Regional development is uneven in the global e-commerce market. The United States is the earliest country to develop e-commerce in the world and its development of e-commerce is in the mature level. The e-commerce development of EU is later than that of the United States. EU is the more advanced area of e-commerce development. As a rookie for the development of e-commerce, Asia has a large market potential, but the development and share is not ideal in recent years. Asia is an area of continuing development of global e-commerce (Mary, 2006).
E-commerce is a developing market with huge potential and attractive development prospects. The number of Internet users in the world has exceeded 100 million in 1998. The commercial sales achieved by Internet reached $ 43 billion and had an increase of 16.08 times compared with $ 2.6 billion in 1997. In 2000 the sales amount of global e-commerce transactions reached $ 120 billion. Morgan chase senior analyst Imran Khan (Leino and Räihä, 2007) expected that global e-commerce market would reach $ 963 billion by 2013. E-commerce has become one of the biggest growths of the global economy in the 21st. Even in this economic crisis, global e-commerce still maintains a rapid growth rate. The overall economic environment will effectively promote Amazon’s the development.
The impact of political/legal environment on Amazon’s international marketing mix
As the application of information technology in the field of trade, E-commerce has made unprecedented progress both in breadth and depth, making world business undergoing dramatic change.
As early as during the 1992 campaign, Clinton proposed the idea of building the information superhighway. After IBM and other companies put forward the concept of “e-commerce”, it got the help of the Clinton administration. Gore spent 18 months drafting the Framework for Global Electric Commerce with an inter-department working group through extensive consultations with academia, industry, customer sector organizations and Internet agencies (Chevalier and Goolsbee, 2003). On July 1, 1997, Clinton formally promulgated the document, and suggested that the issues would reach a global consensus and be signed the agreement. The introduction of the Framework for Global E-commerce meant the formation of systematic e-commerce development policies of the U .S. government (Hof and Himelstein, 1999).
In the second half of 1996, the British launched the “e-government” program. The enterprise can use the latest information technology to obtain government services. In October 1998, the British government issued a “network interests: British e-commerce agenda” and “e-commerce: UK tax policy” to encourage various industries to make full use of information, improve efficiency, develop new markets, and enhance their competitiveness. British Secretary of State for Trade and Industry stressed that the government should create conditions and actively support the development of e-commerce (Linden and Smith, 2003).
Besides, Japan has also set up the e-commerce Promotion Committee. South Korean, Singapore, India, Malaysia and other countries are committed to develop e-commerce and take e-commerce as a strategic tool of national development (Standifird, 2001).
In April 1997, the European Union launched the European e-commerce agreement. In December 1997, the European Union and the United States issued a