Day in the Life at Amazon Business Development
What are the day-to-day responsibilities of an Amazon employee?
The Amazon Business Role
Kenji is a Cornell University graduate, and, in this article, he will detail an average day working at Amazon's business development graduate program.
Let’s hand over to Kenji now to give a breakdown of his day.
Video Breakdown: Amazon Business Development Day in the Life
Day in the Life at Amazon
First, I’ll give a little background so you can better understand my role. At Amazon, within the e-commerce marketplace there are two main ways to sell products. The first one is as a seller (also known as a third party or 3P) and the second is as a vendor (first-party or 1P). To the consumer it doesn’t make a difference, you just see a product on the site and buy it.
Basically, a seller is just a third party that sells their goods directly on Amazon, and in exchange Amazon takes a commission for hosting the service. On the other hand, there are vendors, which means that Amazon buys directly from them at wholesale prices.
Personal Responsibility
In the business development graduate program, I was solely in charge of the vendors, not the sellers. Usually, you’re handed around 2 to 5 accounts (depending on how large they are), and your role is to manage them. The accounts you’re given are usually in one category, basically anything you can find when shopping on Amazon from sport, to cameras, to gardening and home.
Business Goals
As for managing the vendors, it essentially involves growing their presence on Amazon (so getting more products on the site), increasing traffic through marketing and advertising, handling the logistics in terms of making sure that all the orders are being placed and delivered to the right warehouses, and ultimately making sure that customers are buying the products. Generally, the interests of Amazon and the vendors are fairly aligned – to make them more successful.
Hopefully that background will give a bit of context for my day in the life.
Timeline Breakdown
8am-9am
Typically, I wake up around 8am. As I was working from home due to lockdown, there was no commute, which meant that I could lie in a little longer, take my time with breakfast and just overall getting ready. Since it’s a tech company, there’s no dress code and besides, all the interactions were on video calls (don’t worry I still wore trousers!).
9am-10am – Start of the Day
By 9am I would be at my desk ready to start the day. To be honest, Amazon didn’t really enforce a schedule, instead you work to get things done. This can be both good and bad – good if you find the tasks easy and you’re very productive, but also bad if you struggle to complete the tasks. All in all, I do think it’s a better system than just working for the sake of your boss seeing that you’re working, even if you might not have anything to do.
Calendar & Email Check
First things first, I’d check my calendar for the day to see what meetings I have. Then I’d check my emails. There’s normally around 50 every morning from all sorts of market updates, and whilst most of them aren’t relevant to me, I go through them just in case there’s something. Assuming there’s no urgent emails, I’d then go on to check the financials of the accounts I manage.
Account Updates
Basically, I’d go to the database management tool, and put in queries to see if things are looking normal. I’d look at key performance indicators (KPIs) like growth rates, returns, margins etc. for both the accounts I manage, such as Garmin and Under Armour, as well as for the overall category, in this case that would be the sports category. (Please note: these weren’t my accounts, I’m just using them as an example).
10am-10:30am – Vendor Call
The research on KPIs I’d just done would then prepare me nicely for my meeting call at 10 with one of my vendors, as I would have all the relevant data in case they wanted to know what the market was looking like. The market was especially uncertain due to lockdown and people obviously behaving differently to how they might in a normal scenario.
Example Trend Insight
People usually spend the summer outdoors, but this time around lots of people were buying gym equipment, inflatable pools, tech stuff etc. for their homes. This would be a trend I would have noticed when doing my research and I would then be able to notify my vendor accordingly so that they can prioritize certain productions.
Client Profile
Depending on how big the vendor is, I might have a call with the CEO, the Commercial Director, or the Amazon Account Specialist, it usually ranged from 1-3 people on the vendor’s side. At first, I found it quite daunting having a couple of senior executives, usually in their 50s asking me a 23-year-old about what they should do with regards to their margins, production levels, marketing efforts and so on with their Amazon account. Luckily, my Amazon team was supportive, and I got up to speed quickly.
Discussion
Basically, that vendor call would dictate many of my tasks for the upcoming day. Some topics include:
- Purchase Orders
- Upcoming Promotions
- New Season Products
- Additional Questions & Clarifications
10:30am-1pm – Tasks for the day
From 10:30am onwards I would write down all the things that had been discussed in the call, so that I can send it to my managers to keep them in the loop as well as for the vendors and I, to hold ourselves accountable.
For the purposes of this article, so that you can get a better idea of the position, I’ve made up 3 main tasks that the vendor has requested:
- Place an order of 1000 units of smartwatches to XYZ warehouses
- Send a report with the products I think should be marketed for an upcoming promotion
- Send out a report with all the product pages that need improving. This would include things like having poor images, wrong titles, short descriptions etc.
I would then work on these tasks throughout the day, and usually send them in 1 to 3 days depending on how busy we are.
Until 1pm, I’ll be working on these tasks. Some I might be able to do myself without any help, others I might need to ask an expert in that particular area, such as the expert in the supply chain within my team.
Let’s say out of the 3 tasks above, I’m able to complete the 1st of placing the purchase orders, which is rather quick, and the 3rd one on improving the product page. While I’m working on these tasks, it’s not uncommon to get interrupted by colleagues asking for help or to receive an email that I’d need to reply to. Once I’ve done the two tasks, I’ll notify my vendor that they’re done, and that I’m still working on the final one.
1pm-1:30pm – Lunch break
Lunchtime. This would just be at home, mainly because it was more convenient and cheaper. Also, since it was lockdown, most restaurants were closed. I’d say around 30 minutes was a normal lunch time.
1:30pm-2:30pm – Training course
Back to work after lunch, and on this day, there might be a training course for using a specific platform. There’d be people joining onto the call live from all over the world, and there’s one instructor, who’s usually an Amazon employee a couple of years in, teaching us how to use the platform.
These platforms might be things like an internal tool to analyze data, outsource tasks to a support team, or raise errors internally. Essentially, the first 30 minutes of the course would be theory, followed by a 30-minute project or case study which we would need to submit by the end of the hour.
2:30pm-3:30pm – Urgent email
Let’s say after the course I got an urgent email from a vendor about some error with a product. For example, the newest images haven’t been updated, or there’s been an issue with the production, or something like that. Then, for the next hour I would check what’s going on, see if I can fix the problem myself, and if not escalate it to the right team. Hopefully, I could solve the issue in 1 hour and give the good news to the vendor.
3:30-4pm – Break
Between 3.30-4pm, if I’m having an afternoon slump and not feeling very productive, I would just chill on my sofa, on my phone or read something, until I feel energized to get back into work. As I said earlier, at Amazon it’s about getting your job done, not about how many hours you can spend in front of your computer.
4-5pm – Coffee chat
Between 4 to 4.30pm I might have a coffee with my manager. We’d aim to have 2 coffee chats a week just to see where things are at, to check in, and see if I’m doing alright. Also, because we weren’t allowed in the office it was a good way to socialize with my manager. I’d usually use this time to ask specific questions on things I wasn’t sure how to do. For instance, how do I go about selecting products for a promotion. Sometimes my manager would be able to answer them, while other times he would refer me to someone else.
Let’s say during this call, my manager refers me to a colleague who’s the expert in promotion, so then I’d quickly jump on a 30-minute call with them if they’re available (4:30-5pm). During the call, I’d lay out my task, and he would walk me through how to tackle it. Basically, he would give me the information I needed to filter the right products. For example, what are the requirements for a promotion, how much should be invested and so on.
5-7pm – Report preparation
With the information from the call, I would then get started with preparing the report. I’d start by doing some queries on the database management tool to filter by all the requirements I’ve been given and say get a total of 10 products to promote. I’d then prepare a budget for me to share with the vendor and organize the information, so it was visually pleasing for them to understand it better.
Once I have that prepared, I would summarize my findings into an email and send it out to the vendor. This process would normally take around 2 hours.
7-8pm – Admin tasks
For the final hour of the day, I’d just do some admin tasks like replying to emails and chat messages from colleagues asking questions, setting up future meetings and preparing things for the following day.
The end of the day
At around 8pm, I would wrap things up and go for a walk or run outside just to get some fresh air, or maybe even play some football. Then at 9pm, I’d go home and have dinner with my father.
After dinner, I usually didn’t have to work anymore unless there was something urgent, which was fairly rare, maybe once every two weeks. So, then I’d usually chill by either reading or watching YouTube, or work on some personal projects like video editing, photography, or writing! To be honest, during the weekdays I usually wasn’t bothered to meet up with friends, unless it was to do some sport, as I just wanted some time to myself, so I would leave that for Friday evenings or the weekend.
Final Remarks
On a weekly overview, I didn’t work on weekends and most weekdays were around 11 hours. This equates to about 55hours work per week. On Fridays, I would be done about 1 hour before, so say around 7pm. Since Amazon doesn’t really have a strict schedule, some people end up working a lot longer if they’re just slower with tasks, and others may work a lot less than I did if they’re more productive.
Additional Resources
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