"Holy crap! Woot has signed an agreement with Amazon - yes, the Amazon - to become an independent subsidiary of the ecommerce colossus. Woot HQ will remain in Carrollton, Texas, and will operate as autonomously as other Amazon companies like Zappos and Audible.
Visit the blog for our usual snarky commentary and tell us what you think.
- Woot"
Showing posts with label amazon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label amazon. Show all posts
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Breaking: Woot to be acquired by Amazon
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Amazon's amazing growth compared to US retail and e-commerce
A cool chart courtesy of Silicon Alley Insider says it all:
Friday, January 29, 2010
Amazon.com '09: sales +28% to $24.51 billion, profit +40% to $902 million
And here are the slides from Amazon's Q4 '09 earnings webcast:
View more presentations from Michael S. Levy.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Monday, November 2, 2009
E-commerce deals update: Zappos, Ruelala.com
It has been a Happy Halloween for Zappos and RueLaLa :)
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
French private shopping club Vente-privée.com, an e-commerce European success worth USD 1.5 billion
From Techcrunch Europe, an update on private shopping clubs in the US (a.k.a. closed-community shopping websites), on the interest from e-commerce power players on this awesome business model... and on the mother of all private shopping clubs, Vente Privée.
"TechCrunch Europe thus understands, from some very good sources, that Gilt, Amazon and eBay are all actively looking at acquisitions in the European private shopping club space. The price for Vente Privée alone is being talked about in terms of a $1.5 billion sale. Some sources even put the figure at between $2 billion and $4 billion.
One VC I spoke to said Vente Privee was “very attractive” to the big ecommerce beasts like Amazon and eBay, and a roll-up of these types of clubs is potentially in the offing across Europe. Another said “It would be a good move – depending on price – from either Amazon or eBay.”
Read the whole article here.
Monday, August 10, 2009
Retailers shift focus to e-commerce... where retail still has a pulse.
According to the Wall Street Journal, US retail powerhouse Target won't renew its contract with Amazon when it expires in 2011. Target had been outsourcing its e-commerce operations (software, hosting, call center, logistics...) to Amazon since 2001...
As e-commerce grows bigger in the retail market, and as it is the only distribution channel with promises of growth, major retailers finally realize online retail is no longer an afterthought. They want to regain control over it and integrate it with their store channel, in order to create multi-channel offerings for their customers, and get a piece of the online cake before it's too late.
Target is the latest to end their contract to outsource their e-commerce operations at Amazon, after Borders and Toys 'R Us.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Visual product search app maker SnapTell acquired by Amazon
SnapTell, maker of the iPhone and Android app of the same name, has been acquired by Amazon to become part of its A9 line-up.
The SnapTell app enables users to snap a picture of the cover of any DVD, CD, Book or Video game with their phone, and the app will return:
- info on the product from its huge product database,
- reviews, best prices from partner websites and retail stores,
- directions to the retail store you select,
- and the ability to purchase straight from the phone.
If you own an iPhone, you can try it for yourself HERE.
Pretty neat!
A little more user-friendly than the ShopSavvy app where you actually have to snap a picture of the barcode of the product to get info on it.
Monday, June 15, 2009
Amazon will return to TV advertising... with User Generated creative!
User Generated TV advertising, round 2: After Doritos with its Superbowl ad, Amazon has just launched an ad contest, calling on its customers to produce the creative.
The brief is wide open, go nuts!
Monday, April 27, 2009
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Amazon: Now One-Third Of All U.S. E-Commerce
Amazon.com could be responsible for close to a third of all U.S. e-commerce transactions, RBC Capital analyst Stephen Ju asserted in a research note this morning. [...]
Ju’s data suggests the total slice of U.S. e-commerce through Amazon was about 34% in Q4, up from 27% a year earlier.
Friday, March 27, 2009
Recession Special? Amazon shuts down 3 warehouses in the US | AllThingsD
Amazon announced Thursday that it is closing three distribution centers and will cut/transfer the 210 employees.
Amazon Closes Book on Distribution Centers | John Paczkowski | Digital Daily | AllThingsD
Monday, August 11, 2008
Amazon takes on PayPal and Google Checkout with new payment service | InternetRetailer.com
Amazon this week unveiled two payment services, Checkout by Amazon and Amazon Simple Pay, which enable other e-retailers to process payments through Amazon. Checkout by Amazon includes some features, such as shipping and tax calculation and order management services, which Amazon Simple Pay does not. Amazon has been testing the payments services since last summer.
[...]
The biggest draw of these new payment services will be the 81 million consumers already familiar with checking out on Amazon. This is likely to attract small and mid-sized retailers, but bigger players will stay away because they view Amazon as a competitor.
Another concern for all retailers considering the service, is that Amazon will use the data it collects about what’s selling to enhance its own product offerings. An Amazon spokesman replies, "We simply plan to use the data to improve the service for our merchant customers."
InternetRetailer.com - Daily News for Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Monday, June 9, 2008
Big e-commerce website outage = big-time $$ losses | The Amazon case study
When your business is online, being temporarily 'closed for business' is NOT good.
Amazon suffered a service outage in the US on Friday, for a little over an hour and a half. Amazon hadn’t had a big outage for a while...
According to a calculation by CNET, this has resulted in a theoretical loss of about $3 million ($31,000 per minute). Ouch...
(Apparently, the outage did not affect International websites and Amazon Web Services.)
It's Amazon, but still, this is a nice reminder to set your e-commerce business up with a reliable and redundant hosting infrastructure from the get-go. Once your website is live, there's no closing hours. Your shop is open 24/7, and customers flock at all times, day and night :)
Techcrunch's take:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/06/amazon-down-not-answering-calls/
CNET's take:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9962010-7.html
Mashable's take:
http://mashable.com/2008/06/06/amazon-is-down/
No official Amazon news release yet.
Friday, April 4, 2008
Small changes but big impact on Amazon product pages - from Grokdotcom.com
You probably didn’t notice, but Amazon just made it easier to quickly glance at the product you want and get all the information you need in order to buy.
Some small tweaks that really improved the ability to 'skim' product pages, and most probably their already great conversion rate (up to 17.6% in December) ...
Big Impact, Small Changes on Amazon
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Amazon Still Reaping Benefits from Risk on Amazon Prime | BNET.com
Amazon is reaping the benefits from the risk they took with their Amazon Prime offer...Amazon Still Reaping Benefits from Risk on Amazon Prime | BNET Intercom | BNET.com
Jeff Bezos, who was deemed crazy at the time of the Amazon prime launch in early 2005, said this:
"Amazon Prime is all-you-can-eat express shipping," Bezos says. "Though expensive for the company in the short term, it's a significant benefit and more convenient for the customer."
Well, it turns out Bezos was right. The Amazon Prime strategy has helped to accelerate user growth, purchase frequency and unit growth at the company in the past year, while the e-commerce market has "deteriorated".
Meaning: free delivery/unlimited delivery for an annual fee generated more costumers, induced cross-category shopping, increased average basket value and purchase frequency!
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Amazon launches two applications for Facebook... Finally!
Amazon has just put out two applications for social network Facebook:InternetRetailer.com - Daily News for Thursday, March 13, 2008
- Amazon Giver allows users to view friends’ wish lists and link directly to Amazon to purchase gifts.
- Amazon Grapevine displays a Facebook member’s friends’ recent Amazon.com activity (reviews, wish list adds, tags, purchases).
Both applications share information only with friends that the Facebook user selects when adding the application., but not with ALL the user’s friends, in the face of widespread criticism that Facebook's Beacon system violated users’ privacy.
Given Amazon and Facebook's user base size and overlaps (everybody?), and Amazon's huge product catalog, this is going to be a great tool for word-of-mouth marketing. I'll try it out and post some more...
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