Inside Amazon-dot-com

Amazon began as a “bookstore killer” when they offered low-price books shipped straight to your door, but it wasn’t long before they branched out to selling other products. In order to ensure they could offer the biggest variety of products they developed the “Amazon Marketplace” to allow small businesses to sell their products through the Amazon infrastructure. This new feature was essentially the “eBay Killer” and gave small businesses (selling as individuals on a per-item fee basis or as businesses for a monthly fee) a way to expand their reach and have a trusted platform to connect them to new customers. Amazon isn’t intending on stopping there though. In an interesting move, they have now announced a card reader and app that will give them a physical presence in storefronts with the “Amazon Local Register”. Offering low introductory per-transaction rates, the Amazon card reader competes directly with Square, Paypal, and all of the smaller card reader and merchant register se...

Less than an hour ago, Amazon prompted KDP authors (like me) to write an email to  Hachette CEO, Michael Pietsch,  supporting their point of view in their negotiation with Hachette.   It's interesting on how Amazon is finally realizing that it's bullying tactics towards traditional media corporations that are already facing financial challenges are no longer working, and given the enormous size of Amazon, the public now views Amazon with suspicion and as the bully.  While in its email Amazon makes some valid points about how lower cost will actually increase the size of the business by increasing volume, it fails to mention that lowering prices of popular, top-rated eBooks will also result in increased sales of the Kindle devices, eventually allowing it to sell those devices at profit rather than selling them as a cost. This is called vertical competition, consumers have a annual budget for books in their mind and if eBooks are lot cheaper than books, then the br...