by Steven Morrison

Amazon.com

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 Scotland

Data Factory 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 Make change possible

http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Extreme_programming

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?