As brick-and-mortar retail has struggled with years of stagnation,  its rapidly growing online counterpart has continued to mount challenges. There is no doubt that e-commerce has vigorously spurred on the market in recent years and has long to go before reaching its peak, with continued success ensured by growth drivers like M-commerce and changes in consumer behaviour. “What can I do to be successful? How can I reduce my start-up risks without leaving opportunities unexploited?”: These are questions asked by every founder of every new business. Amazon® Marketplace offers a sales channel that is specially intended for founders of retail businesses and can be operated successfully with relatively low investment. This notwithstanding, however, the founding of such a start-up requires very specific know-how. This German-language book supplies comprehensive practical guidance for the successful founding of retail businesses through Amazon® Marketplace. A well-founded reference book with many insider tips.

Statements:

“Conditions have never been more conducive to online retail success than they are today. Despite this, many entrepreneurs face the challenge of being unable to attract the desired volume of customers to their own online shops without huge marketing expense. The Amazon® Marketplace offers one approach to solving this problem. In this book, Markus Fost gives potential founders and practitioners a comprehensive and easily understandable overview of opportunities available in e-commerce. Fost tackles the subject of the Amazon® Marketplace in particular depth, by analysing specific success factors and highlighting opportunities and risks for practitioners’ benefit.” Prof. Dr. Barbara Kreis-Engelhardt, Nürtingen-Geislingen University of Applied Science

Content:

• Start-ups in Germany
• E-commerce
• Amazon Marketplace
• Success factors for e-commerce start-ups through Amazon Marketplace
• Opportunities and risks for e-commerce start-ups by retail businesses through Amazon Marketplace

As far back as 1999, former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder was announcing the rescue of one of Germany’s largest construction companies, Holzmann AG. Around two years later, the company finally went broke: an inglorious end to a corporation with over 150 years of history. It is in no small part due to the global economic crisis that the cry for state aid from large companies is currently increasing in volume: since the Lehman bankruptcy in September 2008, bank loans have been granted only on an extremely restrictive basis, a state of affairs that can also be traced back to the worldwide loss of confidence in interbank trade. While troubled companies such as Opel, Schaeffler and Arcandor are on everyone’s lips due to high levels of public interest – and are being discussed within the political arena – the question arises as to who will prop up the faltering SMEs and smaller ventures that together account for 70.5% of German jobs. As long as companies are making a profit, government deregulation  is pushed forward by the lobbyists; all bets are placed on the “free market”, particularly in the financial sector. If losses are reported in the context of a downturn – though they are often, primarily, as a result of management mistakes – there is scarcely a company too proud to petition the state for help. Privatising profits and socialising losses can never be an acceptable solution.

A team is a group of people pursuing a common goal or a set of related goals and assuming different roles as part of this process. Teamwork has become known for its outstanding achievements over the course of recent history, from discoveries in the aerospace and space sector to huge advances in our understanding of the human genome. Teamwork also contributes to the personal development of individual members, since when we work with others, we learn more than when we work alone. Communication is important for enabling us to overcome shared challenges. Whether a project is ultimately successful depends largely on the quality of collaboration between individual team members. Since successful project management is largely dependent on the team’s collaboration, it is not only the specific objectives of the project that the project manager must focus on, but the relationships in the team and team development.

Research Paper- Many observers, business people and in particular investors see labor cost developments in China as one of the main challenges for their Chinese subsidiaries. Especially in the East-coast region around Shanghai, labor cost has risen significantly within the last decade. For investors having subsidiaries in this region, the outlook on labor market might not look much brighter than it used to. Nevertheless, this development results from the impressive shift China has made in such a short period of time. China is now undergoing one of the most massive urbanizations in human history, which becomes nowhere more evident than in Shanghai.