LO1: E-Commerce site - Amazon

a) Amazon’s purpose is to sell anything to anyone! People can search for whatever they want to buy and it will be available for a good price, usually better than in shops. You can buy either from Amazon or from third-party sellers so there is almost nothing that you can't buy. The target audience is everyone because it stocks products for all ages.

b) Since Amazon is a website which sells just about any product, visitors will need to be able to search for the item they want. They can do this by using the search bar or a drop-down menu to select the "department" they want to look in. Customers might also want to read a review of a product before buying, or leave their own review after buying. They are able to do this using the easy-to-use rate and review system.

c) The large search bar is placed centrally at the top of the homepage as an essential part of the website. Just to the left of this is the drop-down "department" menu, where you can select which area you want to shop in, for example "sports and outdoors". There is also a large advertisement placed underneath the search bar. Whilst browsing for a product, the products are shown in a list centrally and take up most of the screen. Finally, once you have selected a product, there is a clear yellow button labelled "add to basket" situated to the right of the product, and also a rating out of 5 stars shown under the product title. This can be clicked to read and write reviews.

d) The key features of Amazon are the ability to search and view search results, the ability to create your own personal account, the ability to rate and review products using the account, the shopping basket which you can use to place items for purchasing, and the "recommended items" section, which shows you items you might be interested in based on purchase history.

e) The benefit of the site for Amazon is that it gets a share of profit from sales of third-party sellers, and all of the profit from items it sells itself, which is the vast majority. This means it makes a huge amount of profit everyday. The benefit of the site for customers is that they can get any item they might want at an affordable price.

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