Amazon and its Consumers Trust

While searching for an NPR consumer research study through Google searches, I had found an article titled Consumer trust may be Amazon's true competitive advantage. This article had been caught right at the beginning due to the fact that I have been following the Facebook privacy leak and its coverage on that. Due to this the factor of trust has been a huge concern for the average consumer on a regular basis regarding what would be helpful and what would be bad for them. In a recent Poll taken by the NPR it states that "92 percent of US online shoppers have used Amazon to buy something" (Sterling) This greatly shows that large amounts of people in the US greatly use Amazon and trust it, or else this large quantity of the US would be using Amazon as their center for shopping source.

Amazon uses itself as a promoter for other product and products of their own. They are an online Walmart if you will which allows them (Amazon) to control their own independent variables. The dependent variable is strictly dependent of the consumer and the best option for them that Amazon is providing them with.

This survey shows that even with Amazon has a large quantity of consumers that are still relying on them to get their product shipped to them and keep their information safe by how often they shop their. Due to the amount of times that a consumer shops at amazon, that shows that they really trust the Amazon as a site for their online shopping. 

In the time that we live in now with the whole Facebook scandal starting to raise everyone's suspicion about how safe their information is and site renewing their privacy policies, as said in the article which I agree with, Amazon is really stepping up their trust and sales within this new age of a lot of things being done online and taking advantage of that. They also are improving their delivery technology so that they can hopefully gain more consumers and gain their trust within the company.

If I were to do the study differently, I would research how many people are become more pro-Amazon due to the fact that their may be a time advantage regarding saving time by shopping online. Another thing that I would like to look into would be to see how  many people have joined Amazon and Amazon Prime and around what time period was their a large spike in memberships. This could reveal a lot about the company and when people started to shop online more often than in stores. 

Part 2

My client is a small business owner in Maine who is a heating and burner technician. If I were to apply the regression line to his sales and the marketing used, I would first have to figure out the predictors to then figure out the independent and dependent variables. The predictors would be the use of online / sign marketing while the other would be word of mouth marketing. To collect this data, I would have surveys sent out over the phone and by email to the recipients of the service where they could then tell us how they heard of him specifically. While this sounds easy, it may be hard to analyze the data as to who actually remembers or who forgot where they found out about this small business. It may be easier to allow their to be multiple people with specific jobs for someone to do jobs and for someone to analyze the data that is presented. The size of the data would consist of the people who had a service within the last month. This would allow their to be enough data to consist a generous sample which includes a various amount of people and locations. 

After doing research on the people who received service within the last month, I believe that the results would be positive due to the fact that there are a large quantity of people who are in different locations and have received a service on a different day which allows their to be a vast variety of opinions and data to be stored.

With a survey that would include how they found out about the service and their reaction as to how it went, I believe that the larger predictor would be word of mouth due to the fact that the area that he works in is small and not a lot of other large competition allows for him to go unnoticed. 

I believe that this would be able to be conducted by the end of the semester. While it may be hard, I could do this all on my own with a little bit of help from the owner, the data could be easily collected. Some challenges would be what time to call people where they are not busy and are able to answer the phones. Although, if all of the calls were made right in the morning or right at night around dinner time, then people would most likely be around their phones for the survey.