Netizen: Amazon.com

Showing posts with label Amazon.com. Show all posts

Friday, March 07, 2014

Shake That Thing: Does Amazon Have No Limits?

In 2003, #Amazon & #RadioShack each had about $5b in sales". In 2013, $AMZN was $75b to $RSH at $3.5b. http://t.co/kgK64VrBA2 #Retail #Tech
— Michael Parekh (@MParekh) March 4, 2014

The Atlantic: RadioShack Is Doomed (and So Is Retail)

RadioShack's long slide coincides the steep ascendance of Amazon as America's great brick-and-mortar destroyer. In 2003, Amazon and RadioShack each had about $5 billion in sales, as WSJ business editor Dennis Berman pointed out. Last year, Amazon had $75 billion to RadioShack's $3.5 billion. ....... At the end of 2013, RadioShack had 5,000 brick-and-mortar stores with 27,500 employees and $3.5 billion in sales, which is $127,000 in sales per employee. Its website is the 1,066th most popular in the world. At the end of 2013, Amazon had zero brick-and-mortar stores with 117,300 employees (full- and part-time) and $75 billion in sales, which is $640,000 in sales per employee. Its website is the 5th most popular in the world. ..... The company's biggest sales category is the wireless market, and that's some of the worst news for RadioShack. “The mobile phones category was very weak, and mall traffic is very weak,” analyst David Schick said. “The majority of folks have their mobile phones. We are past adoption.” ...... the confluence of e-retail and increasingly efficient global sourcing and stocking (i.e.: the Amazon & Wal-Mart Effect) would eventually gut retail employment ...... With $600,000 in sales per employee, Amazon is 3X-4X more efficient than the stores it's eating.

Does Amazon.com have no limits? It does. It has severe limits. (1) It is not even attempting to do High Touch. Health and education are all about High Touch, it seems. That same principle can be applied to traditional retail. (2) You can piggyback on Amazon infrastructure and do retail. You can use their warehouses.

Stores like RadioShack do have the option to rise from the ashes. But I doubt they will. The rethink that is required, I don't think they will go for it. RadioShack is like the New York Times. It has taken a Huffington Post to "get" digital. News is not going away. Neither is retail. If anything it is getting bigger than ever. RadioShack has to move from being a poorly stocked itty bitty warehouse to being an experience.

Hey @DKThomp I don't @amazon is the final word on retail, if there ever was http://t.co/MuFZ030eDl — Paramendra Bhagat (@paramendra) March 7, 2014

Hey @MParekh I don't think @amazon is the final word on retail. http://t.co/MuFZ030eDl — Paramendra Bhagat (@paramendra) March 7, 2014

Hello @RadioShack http://t.co/MuFZ030eDl — Paramendra Bhagat (@paramendra) March 7, 2014

Do Amazon's Lockers Help Retailers? Staples and Radio Shack said no while coffee and copy shops say yes. http://t.co/pWGJY04xxh via @BW — Brad Stone (@BradStone) September 20, 2013

Amazon lockers are one step beyond delivery by van. It is a little more High Touch, but not all the way still.

BusinessWeek: Do Amazon's Lockers Help Retailers? Depends on What They Sell

The incentive for any business hosting an Amazon locker isn’t the monthly stipend the online retailer pays—”not even worth it,” says the manager of a Manhattan copy shop—but the lure of higher store traffic given the online retailer’s enormous sales volume and the gazillions of brown boxes sent across the nation each day...... many people who can’t reliably get their online purchases at work or at home ..... Coffee shops, parking garages, supermarkets, pharmacies, and copy-printing stores don’t have Amazon as a rival, whereas a retailer such as Staples will quickly realize that Amazon sells virtually everything it does—and possibly cheaper. ...... one reason 7-Eleven, home of the microwave burrito and gargantuan Slurpee—neither sold fresh by Amazon—seems to like its lockers just fine. (You can purchase a $24.99, 7-Eleven-branded Slurpee Maker machine on the site, however.) .... Bonhomme says his copy shop’s traffic has gradually picked up over the six months that the business has had a locker.

Disney Bets $1 Billion on Technology to Track Theme-Park Visitors

Walt Disney’s (DIS) $1 billion experiment in crowd control, data collection, and wearable technology that could change the way people play—and spend—at the Most Magical Place on Earth. ..... If the system works, it could be copied not only by other theme parks but also by museums, zoos, airports, and malls. ...... MyMagic+ promises far more radical change. It’s a sweeping reservation and ride planning system that allows for bookings months in advance on a website or smartphone app. Bracelets called MagicBands, which link electronically to an encrypted database of visitor information, serve as admission tickets, hotel keys, and credit or debit cards; a tap against a sensor pays for food or trinkets. The bands have radio frequency identification (RFID) chips—which critics derisively call spychips because of their ability to monitor people and things. ..... Disney’s $14.1 billion theme park and resort business. ...... “a more immersive, more seamless, and more personal experience”—allowing Disney employees to address a child by name, for example, or wish someone a happy birthday. “The implications for big data and for personalization are extraordinary,” says Quinby. “It could radically change interaction between customers and the company.”

Apple's Location-Tracking iBeacon Is Poised for Use in Retail Sales

a new technology called iBeacon that can pinpoint your location to within a few feet. ...... Prior to iBeacon, iPhones and other Apple mobile devices relied on GPS and Wi-Fi tower triangulation to track their location. Those are great technologies and remain part of iOS, but they’re only precise within 30 feet or so. That’s fine if you’re walking into an airport; iOS Passbook users already see their boarding pass pop up when they arrive at their terminal. GPS and Wi-Fi are less useful in smaller spaces such as stores. IBeacon can nail down device location more precisely because it uses Bluetooth Low Energy, a new version of the ubiquitous wireless standard. ...... Bluetooth LE can run constantly, announcing your phone’s presence to nearby devices with the short-distance accuracy of a conventional Bluetooth at little cost to battery life. ........ IBeacon’s range is about 84,000 square feet, Gottipati says. A typical Macy’s store of 175,000 square feet would need two or three iBeacon transmitters. Third-party manufacturers such as Estimote sell a three-pack for $99 ...... That’s another advantage iBeacon has over NFC: It’s not just a payment system. “There are opportunities for marketing and selling that don’t play in the NFC world”

Dell's Pitch: You Can't All Use Amazon Why Amazon Is on a Warehouse Building Spree

For a company whose showrooms are all online, Amazon.com (AMZN) spends a staggering amount on bricks and mortar. The e-commerce giant has invested roughly $13.9 billion since 2010 to build 50 new warehouses, more than it had cumulatively spent on storage facilities since its 1994 founding, bringing the total to 89 at the end of 2012. ..... Software that can sort items by delivery date and optimize storage space has helped Amazon roughly double the number of items it can ship per facility, says Clark. The warehouses are operational within 10 months, down from two years before the building spree started. ..... as the company adds 5,000 full-time jobs in 17 U.S. warehouses to its 20,000 existing employees, along with 2,000 customer service workers ...... Upstarts such as online grocery deliverer Instacart are moving in the opposite direction. “We don’t have to build warehouses, lease a fleet of trucks, or manage perishable inventory,” says Instacart Chief Executive Officer Apoorva Mehta, a former Amazon employee. Unlike AmazonFresh, which ships groceries in Seattle and Los Angeles, Mehta’s San Francisco-based startup guarantees delivery in less than two hours, using contract shoppers who drive their own cars to customers. ..... Since the start of 2010 the company’s stock has more than doubled.

To Tout Good Jobs, Visit Main Street, Not Amazon

Friday, February 15, 2013

How I Just Made Two Purchases

Image representing Amazon as depicted in Crunc...

Image via CrunchBase

Last night in Union Square I met a fellow Ingress player called Omar, Ingress name Slomar. We talked. I griped about "battery life." He suggested I get an external battery.

Today I googled around. Then I gave up. The choices were too confusing. I was gonna wait.

Then I did the near daily thing of visiting TechMeme. From there I ended up at this news story.

Google must act quickly on libellous Blogger posts, says appeal court

At the bottom of the news story was this ad.

It was a near perfect price for a perfect product, something I really needed to get. The ad did what my Google searches were not able to do.

So I proceeded to place the order.

While doing so Amazon said they would give me a free 30 day trial on Amazon Prime, if I accepted, the product would get free two day shipping. I opted in for the two day free shipping.

Then I have been browsing around their movie catalog. It is quite amazing. I think I am going to stay with Amazon Prime after the month long free trial is over. It is $79 per year. I could easily watch 50 movies in one year. And I guess you get to borrow one book a month for free. I am not a frequent Amazon shopper. But free shipping is enticing. I am now more likely to search on Amazon before elsewhere for some future purchases. I am locked in a little I guess, but I am not unhappy about it.

Here Google and Amazon did not compete. They provided me with a seamless experience. This is sound capitalism. The consumer won. I won.

Monday, December 24, 2012

Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook: Coalition Partners

Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook. True, these are the tech giants at the cutting edge, and it is but natural that they might have turf wars - good for the consumer - but I still see it as them working together to eat up more and more of the traditionally offline action. More and more advertising will move to the digital realm. More and more searching will happen online. More and more buying will happen online. More and more socializing will have online components.

Analysis: Amazon, Google on collision course in 2013

Lurking in the shadows for both Google and Amazon is Facebook with its own search and advertising ambitions. .... "Amazon wants to be the one place where you buy everything. Google wants to be the one place where you find everything, of which buying things is a subset.... So when you marry those facts I think you're going to see a natural collision." .... 96 percent of Google's $38 billion in 2011 sales came from advertising. ..... But Amazon's newly developed "DSP" technology, which taps into the company's vast store of consumer purchase history to help marketers target ads at specific groups of people on Amazon.com and on other websites, could change all that. ... "From a client's perspective, the data that Amazon owns is actually better than what Google has.....They know what you just bought, and they also know what you are right now trying to buy." ..... By showing ads for products that it may not actually sell on its own website, Amazon establishes itself as a starting point for consumers looking to buy something on the Web.

Can Google Challenge Apple Without Apple's Manufacturing Prowess?

Steve Jobs did the marketing pizazz, it was Cook who really built that chain capable of churning out tens of millions of pieces of a new product in the first quarter after release. ..... They can actually execute on a large scale out there in the physical world.

Friday, July 27, 2012

Google Books Deserves To Get Life

Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc...

Image via CrunchBase

Just like sane countries force broadband providers to share their pipes with competitors, Google Books should be made to share its content to other online distributors, and authors of the books should get their cut, but the idea of getting in the way of digital books is plain stupid. Why deprive humanity of the treasure trove?

Google urges end to authors' digital book lawsuit

its ambitious plan to build the world's largest digital book library .... Google has said it has scanned more than 20 million books, and posted English-language snippets of more than 4 million .... authors actually benefit because the database helps people find and buy their books ..... a "de facto monopoly" to copy books en masse without permission and served to "further entrench" its market power in online searches. ..... Among the libraries whose works have been scanned are those of Harvard University, Oxford University, Stanford University, the University of California, the University of Michigan, and the New York Public Library .... The United States, Amazon.com Inc and Microsoft Corp had been among those to raise antitrust concerns about the settlement.

Paper books should feel odd. Digital books should be the norm. Digital copies of all books current and past should be available. Why do you want to get in the way of authors penetrating markets?

Same Day Delivery: Possible

Not under all circumstances, and not everywhere, and not for every item, but what's the big deal with same day shipping? If you placed your order in the morning, why can't you have it by the time you get home in the evening?

Amazon CFO 'doesn't see a way to do same-day delivery'