Stride
TC: Stride, a CRM system salespeople will hate – but freelancers will love; http://j.mp/ynHb25 #CRM http://eicker.at/CRM
Tagged: Sales Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Gerrit Eicker
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Gerrit Eicker
eBooks Pricing
pC: Who should control the pricing of eBooks? Publishers or Amazon? http://j.mp/zFvCmg #eBooks http://eicker.at/eBooks
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Gerrit Eicker
Amazon Store?
Is Amazon going to open a store in Seattle? Physical bricks around the corner? Clicks to bricks? http://eicker.at/AmazonStore
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Gerrit Eicker
Facebook Credits for Websites
Facebook Credits expand further: outreach to every website, going beyond Facebook Apps; http://eicker.at/FacebookCreditsWeb
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Gerrit Eicker
Facebook: “Facebook Credits for websites – We have begun working with a few developers to test the ability to offer Facebook Credits on websites, with the goal of helping them offer a more unified app experience to users beyond apps on Facebook. One early example is Collapse! Blast on Gamehouse.com. – At this time, we are focused on gathering early developer feedback. We will keep you posted as our tests continue. If you are interested in Facebook Credits for websites should we broaden the test, please sign up here.”
GigaOM: “Facebook isn’t a true PayPal competitor, but it’s taking some steps toward becoming an online payments provider outside of its Facebook properties. The social networking giant has begun testing the use of Facebook Credits on two games, Uno Boost and Collapse! Blast, both available on gaming portal GameHouse. … This could be a big springboard for Facebook to become a major payments player if it aggressively takes its Facebook Credits to other properties on the web. … I wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook is eyeing this market. Mobile payments is booming now and expected to become a $670 billion market by 2015. But it starts with small tests like the one with GameHouse. … Hulett said he believes though its early Facebook Credits could be a big driver of revenue for Facebook, similar to how PayPal has become the main engine of growth for eBay. That will still be ways off, but if Facebook plays its cards right and learns important lessons along the way, it might not be a stretch.”
IF: “Facebook’s virtual currency is currently the mandatory payment method for all Facebook games on the web, a payment option for Facebook apps, and became available as a payment option to mobile app developers last week. … If the test does indicate a demand for Credits as a payment option outside of Facebook.com, its unclear whether Facebook would require developers to use its virtual currency exclusively. It could simply make them an additional payment option, the way Credits currently work for Facebook.com apps as well as mobile apps and games. … More users maintaining a balance of Credits also makes Facebook a more lucrative platform for developers. … Facebook Credits for Websites could become a significant revenue source and powerful way to attract developers.”
ATD: “Facebook is now allowing its virtual currency to be used off of its social network, a feature that some game companies are finding valuable as they seek new ways to monetize their own sites. … GameHouse is one of the first to try using Credits off of the network, but there will likely be others following. – Earlier this month, Zynga announced Project Z, its own gaming platform, which will provide a seamless game experience between Facebook and its own Web site. Despite creating a separate game network, as we wrote at the time of the announcement, Facebook’s influence will be everywhere.”
ZDNet: “Facebook takes a 30 percent cut of all revenue earned through Facebook Credits, leaving developers with the remaining 70 percent. It’s not clear how much revenue the company makes from the virtual currency, but it appears to be a growing percentage of its overall revenue. It could be massive if Facebook Credits for websites takes off.“
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Gerrit Eicker
Google Call Tracking
Google enables and optimises call tracking from mobile landing pages; http://eicker.at/GoogleCallTracking
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Gerrit Eicker
Google: “Mobile advertising has created an entirely new opportunity for businesses to drive phone calls to sales teams and call centers, generating a new method for our advertisers to receive qualified incoming leads. In fact, since we introduced the click-to-call feature to advertisers over a year ago, we’ve had more than half a million customers globally run campaigns with phone extensions. – Two of the most common ways to get mobile customers to call you are either by listing your phone number on a click-to-call ad, or adding your phone number onto your website. It’s easy to measure calls from a click-to-call ad from your Campaign reports, but it can be more challenging to track the calls made by consumers clicking on the phone number on your website. – Today, we are introducing a new conversion tracking metric to help advertisers and agencies do just that: all AdWords accounts will now have the ability to report calls placed from mobile pages. … You’ll now be able to attribute clicks on your phone number or ‘call’ button back to the AdWords campaign, ad group, ad or keyword that brought a customer in. As this is a new tracking metric, there won’t be new charges or changes to CPCs. We hope that this new metric will give advertisers and agencies new, richer information on the value and returns from their mobile advertising.”
Google: “This January [2011], we launched a Click-to-call functionality for mobile ads that enables advertisers to directly connect with potential customers over the phone. In less than a year, Click-to-call (CTC) ads have come a long way and hundreds of thousands of advertisers are using the ad format today. In fact, over the past three months we’ve seen the number of Google advertisers using phone extensions on mobile grow 28% month-over-month, globally. What’s more, Click-to-call ads on both Google Search and Display Networks are generating millions of calls every month on mobile. – We’re excited to see this response to Click-to-call ads and we’re only just getting started! … For more insight into the performance of your Phone Extensions and Call-only Creative ads, enable the AdWords Call Metrics feature. Using a dynamically assigned Google Voice number, Call Metrics provide campaign-level statistics on the number of phone leads generated by your AdWords ads including call duration and caller area code. Currently, Call Metrics is only available to a limited number of US advertisers, but we plan to bring this feature to more advertisers in the coming months.”
SEL: “Google’s Click to Call program has been a huge success. About a year ago Google reported that it had 500,000 advertisers using Click to Call. (That number was repeated again today in a blog post.) And last year former Google Product SVP Jonathan Rosenberg said ‘Click-to-Call ads are generating millions of calls every month.‘ – Calls and call metrics are increasingly important to Google because they’re a form of ‘offline’ conversion tracking that provides more visibility on the true efficacy of keywords and campaigns. … Google’s Click to Call program has relied to date on AdWords phone extensions. Phone numbers in mobile ads (on smartphones) are highlighted, users click them and initiate calls. Those calls are tracked. … For the present the new tracking capability is free. On the PC side Google charges $1 per completed call for its call tracking capability. I’m speculating by analogy that Google may eventually charge a fee for the service. They have not indicated to me that they will however.“
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Gerrit Eicker
Social Business: Strategy, Measurement, Engagement
Social business: harnessing intelligence, measuring community health, moving to engagement; http://eicker.at/SocialBusiness
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Gerrit Eicker
Hinchcliffe: “As businesses begin looking strategically at big data as a way to improve their business performance, an important element of their efforts will be in the burgeoning capability of social analytics… 1. Social media has become the primary creative channel for new information. 2. Business intelligence must look at the whole ecosystem. 3. New techniques are required for social analytics as well as to handle the volumes of big data that result. – While the field is somewhat new, as social analytics has only had a real run-up the last two years, some obvious strategies have started to emerge. For now, most organizations will be trying to build basic social BI capabilities and get experience with them…
- Expertise and Reputation Tracking
- Customer Engagement and Retention
- Social Business Adoption Tracking
- Funnel Analysis
- Social Supply Chain Management
- Human Capital Management
- Compliance and Regulatory Tracking
- Brand Insight
- Operations Management
There are other ways to apply social BI but these will be the most common ones for the majority of companies building or acquiring such capabilities.”
Camargo: “Creating successful online communities is still more art than science, yet techniques and frameworks are now emerging to turn social business into a real discipline. This week we take a look at a new case study that explores metrics that can measure the intrinsic health of communities instead of looking purely at size as the defining barometer. … Conventional wisdom tells us Community Owners should rely on two key metrics to track the success of an online community: Membership (number of registered users) and participation (number of active users in a given time period). That’s well and good but what about measuring the health of the community, not just its size? … Each and every community out there will have its own particular intricacies and you organization will surely require you to adhere to its own KPIs and reporting frameworks. In our case, the content contribution pyramid-inspired reporting model was a very valuable addition to our reporting toolbox. This KPI enabled us to understand variations in context, purpose and participants within each of our communities while keeping an eye on overall growth trends.”
Hinchcliffe: “When we look back at the first decade of the 21st century, it will be obvious that a few momentous changes in the business and computing landscape occurred. Of these, one of the most profound has been a decreasing emphasis on systems of record and the move towards what are called systems of engagement. … Systems of record have matured to the point where there’s only a little strategic advantage to having your own unique capability. Instead, the discussion on strategic technology has shifted to the other 40% of what businesses in industrialized nations do: Knowledge work. … Thus, using technology to enable knowledge work as a strategic capability has sparked a growing interest in improving what are increasingly known as systems of engagement. … For enterprises, ground zero for the transition to systems of engagement in many companies often centers around any pending update of the corporate intranet. … What’s also clear about the changes taking place in businesses today is that systems of record are not going away. … New systems of engagement are now receiving considerable attention in the forms of online communities, crowdsourcing, Social CRM, open APIs, and many other means as a way to connect customers and business partners together to achieve useful outcomes with the most cost-effectiveness and largest result.“
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Gerrit Eicker
Kindle Fire
Amazon’s Kindle Fire might finally change the whole publishing industry – irrevocable; http://eicker.at/KindleFire
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Gerrit Eicker
TC: “On Wednesday morning in New York City, Amazon will unveil the Kindle Fire. Yes, this is the name Amazon has settled on, to help differentiate the product from the e-ink Kindles… It will be a 7-inch backlit display tablet that looks similar to the BlackBerry PlayBook. … [H]aving played with a DVT model myself, I can assure you that it’s better than the PlayBook because the software is better and, more importantly, the content available is much better. … We also originally heard that Amazon Prime would be included, as a big enticement for would-be buyers. That may be off the table for now as well – but it’s not yet clear. It’s possible Amazon will release one version with Prime included for $300 and a version without it for $250. Getting Amazon Prime for $50 would still be a deal, since it’s normally $79 for the year.”
pC: “The success of the Kindle shows Amazon is prepared to think differently from others and to disrupt its own products – in the Kindle’s case to disrupt the cash cow of print book sales – in order to be innovative and seize early advantage in digital markets. If Amazon’s hardware is undifferentiated and virtually the same as RIM’s PlayBook then Amazon has to differentiate elsewhere with content, experience and business models. Otherwise it will suffer the same fate as RIM’s PlayBook. … Amazon will build a true media tablet. The first true media tablet. The Kindle tablet will focus on the future of all media – TV, movies, music, books, magazines – to enable Amazon to become the dominant digital media retailer. That is Amazon’s ambition.”
Guardian: “Amazon hopes its brand recognition and loyal book-buying customer base will enable it to do battle with Apple, which produced 75% of the tablets sold this year. – Research firm Forrester reckons the Kindle tablet could sell between 3m and 5m units in its first year.”
VB: “The timing of Amazon’s announcement might have something to do with competition from Barnes and Nobel, which is also allegedly scheduled to announce a new Nook Color tablet that will also retail for $250.”
ATD: “In 2010, magazine publishers got giddy about the prospects of selling their stuff on the iPad. This year’s version of the story: Lots of enthusiasm, tempered with a little bit of skepticism, over Amazon’s new tablet. … Publishers will keep around 70 percent of all Amazon sales, and the retailer will share some customer data with the publishers. … The publishers who are on board with Amazon view their decision to link up as a no-brainer: They want more distribution channels for their stuff, not fewer. And they’ve been begging, unsuccessfully, for a credible competitor to the iPad since April 2010.”
TC: “With the launch of the Kindle Fire tomorrow, I thought it would be fun to write a little bit sci-fi and imagine what the publishing market will look like in the next ten or so years. I’m a strong proponent of the ebook and, as I’ve said again and again, I love books but they’re not going to make it past this decade, at least in most of the developed world. … 2025 – The transition is complete even in most of the developing world. The book is, at best, an artifact and at worst a nuisance. Book collections won’t disappear – hold-outs will exist and a subset of readers will still print books – but generally all publishing will exist digitally.”
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Gerrit Eicker
TC: “Amazon Fires $199, 7-Inch Tablet At Apple – The Fire itself is rather characterless and dull. It looks a lot like the 7-inch BlackBerry PlayBook (probably for good reason) and features just enough tech to pass as acceptable. There’s a two-point multitouch screen (the iPad has a 10-point screen), and an unspecified CPU… The most notable change is obviously the multitouch 7-inch LCD rather than an e-ink display, but moreover, the Kindle Fire is a complete storefront for the retailer rather than just an ereader. The tablet features apps for Amazon’s Android Appstore, Kindle store, Amazon MP3, and Prime Instant Video. … Amazon is pricing this model aggressively. Bloomberg is reporting prior to Amazon’s official event that the Kindle Fire hits at just $199 and comes with 30-days of Amazon Prime.”
TC: “Amazon has revealed a new line of E-Ink Kindles that looks to bolster their ‘traditional’ eReader lineup. The three new models have taken the stage: the $79 Kindle, the $99 Kindle Touch, and the $149 Kindle Touch 3G. – The new super small, non-touch Kindle was announced to appeal to Amazon’s legion of eReading purists. It’s small enough to fit in a pack pocket, and will cost users a scant $79 – customers can order today, and Amazon says it will ship today too.”
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Gerrit Eicker
GigaOM: “They say Apple has met its first real tablet competitor. And no, it is not Samsung or Motorola. Instead it is from a company that started out selling books on the Internet: Amazon. And while there is some truth to that assertion, I wouldn’t put a lot of weight in the argument. … With the new Kindles, Amazon has been able to define the hybrid retail environment. … Given that we are increasingly shifting away from buying physical media and are instead opting for digital goods, Amazon is smart in its introducing the new Kindle tablet. … Amazon’s primary business is selling us things – lots of them – and getting them to us as cheaply as possible. And that includes physical and digital goods and services. That is its corporate DNA, and that DNA is going to influence all of its decisions – whether it is redesigning its website or defining new tablets. … The bottom line is that Amazon will be successful – at least more successful than Motorola or HTC – but it won’t come at the expense of Apple’s iPad or Samsung’s Android-based tablets.“
Gerrit Eicker
Facebook Like Button(s)
Facebook Like gets sharing granularity: hypersharing becomes (scarily) automatic; http://eicker.at/FacebookLikeButtons
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Gerrit Eicker
Forbes: “Facebook released a broad new set of social features Thursday that makes it easier for people to share a wide range of information about themselves. The new changes could boost the quantity of sharing and change the quality of information that people push through the social network. … [P]eople can now automatically share what music they’re listening to, what television or movies they’re watching, what news they’re reading and even what food they’re eating or what exercise they’re doing. It’s ‘frictionless’ to share in Mark Zuckerberg’s words. … The upshot of this is that Facebook is going way beyond enabling people to simply share their interests, to enabling people to share virtually anything they’re doing both online and offline. … The connection between sharing and actual purchases is one that Facebook is careful about, particularly after Beacon. But with all the sharing about products that people will inevitably do through the new changes, more traffic will be driven to companies’ sites where people can make purchases.”
AF: “Facebook’s annual f8 developer conference promised a lot of things today, but one cool subset of them takes the most popular interaction on the site and spins off variations. – We’re talking about the like button here. – Today, we click like when really a more specific action is involved but the thumbs-up is only option that exists. – So, get ready for buttons that could include: Want, Buy, Own, Listen to, Read, Eat, Watch, Work out… the open graph will also make people’s news feeds more customized than ever, requiring a more complex algorithm than the one that currently determines what people see on their home pages.- The algorithm that Facebook today calls EdgeRank becomes GraphEdge tomorrow.”
Mashable: “You can’t deny the success of Facebook’s Like button. Its popularity quickly skyrocketed; it took less than a month for the button to appear on more than 100,000 websites. Now it is a standard method for endorsing something on the social web. – But that’s exactly the problem – the Like button is an endorsement. … Facebook’s bet is that more people will click a button that says they’ve ‘Listened’ to a song or ‘Watched’ a video, rather than simply liking it. … It’s Facebook’s partners that will take this capability and turn it into applications that populate Facebook and their websites with these Gestures, though. That’s Facebook’s plan – to become the social layer on which the web is built. … The new Open Graph will change Facebook drastically.”
Forrester: “If there’s one thing Facebook is not afraid of, it’s change. … Facebook is laying claim to your life. Through its new Timeline feature that recaps in one fell swoop everything you’ve ever posted and lets you feature the highlights, along with its new apps that let you discover and share real-time experiences like watching movies and listening to music, Facebook is changing the social networking game. Of course you could argue that it was already acting as the online identity for many people, but this takes it to a whole new level.”
TC: “Unlike the Like button which gives you a way to explicitly share individual pieces of content, this Read plug-in (and presumably, Watch, Listen, etc, plugins) would allow third-parties to add a single button to their site to enable some of the automatic actions Facebook unveiled today. … To be clear, this button will be totally opt-in for users. And the button will also have ‘pause’ and ‘undo’ capabilities if a user decides they actually don’t want to share their activity automatically, Taylor said. – And the regular old Like button will continue to exist for users who still want to share specific pieces of content to Facebook.”
RWW: “While the focus of today’s Facebook announcements was the newTimeline profile, the Read, Watch, Listen media sharing apps have generated a lot of interest too. These so-called ‘social apps‘ haven’t been widely launched yet, but you can get a sense of what they will do by adding a couple of brand new newspaper social apps to your Facebook profile: The Guardian’s app and one from Washington Post. – Be forewarned though, with these apps you’re automatically sending anything you read into your Facebook news feed. No ‘read’ button. No clicking a ‘like’ or ‘recommend’ button. As soon as you click through to an article you are deemed to have ‘read’ it and all of your Facebook friends and subscribers will hear about it. That could potentially cause you embarrassment and it will certainly add greatly to the noise of your Facebook experience.”
Winer: “Facebook is scaring me – Yesterday I wrote that Twitter should be scared of Facebook. Today it’s worse. I, as a mere user of Facebook, am seriously scared of them. … This time, however, they’re doing something that I think is really scary, and virus-like. The kind of behavior deserves a bad name, like phishing, or spam, or cyber-stalking. … Now, I’m not technically naive. I understood before that the Like buttons were extensions of Facebook. They were surely keeping track of all the places I went. … People joke that privacy is over, but I don’t think they imagined that the disclosures would be so proactive. They are seeking out information to report about you. That’s different from showing people a picture that you posted yourself. If this were the government we’d be talking about the Fourth Amendment. … One more thing. Facebook doesn’t have a web browser, yet, but Google does. It may not be possible to opt-out of Google’s identity system and all the information gathering it does, if you’re a Chrome user. – PS: There’s a Hacker News thread on this piece. It’s safe to click on that link (as far as I know).“
Gerrit Eicker
AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo vs. Google
AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo have agreed to sell each other’s display advertising inventory to challenge Google; http://eicker.at/AMY
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Gerrit Eicker
ATD: “AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft compete for ad dollars. But a new pact calls for the rivals to cooperate on ad sales, too. – The three companies are going to start selling ad inventory on each others’ sites, in a plan they hope will make them more competitive with Google. … Executives from all three companies briefed a group of top Web publishers and ad buyers about the plan at a dinner presentation last night in Manhattan. … The three companies will share revenue on the ads, and supposedly they’ll pocket more than they would have if a third-party ad network sold their stuff.”
Guardian: “The potential tie-up comes days after reports that AOL and Yahoo, fallen giants of the first age of the internet, were discussing a merger in the wake of the firing of Yahoo’s chief executive, Carol Bartz. … The advertising hook-up, in the meantime, could help slow the fast growth of Google and Facebook in the lucrative online display advertising market. – Google has long dominated search advertising – or online classified advertising – but overtook Yahoo in display advertising in May this year in the US, according to research firm IDC.”
pC: “All three of issued statements to the effect that there have been some ties before and the portals are exploring ‘future’ collaborations. … But ultimately, it’s hard to see what the value of the three combining sales efforts would be. There is a tremendous amount of similarity in terms of reach among AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft. So where’s the complement? … The reason Google and Facebook are eating away at the portals’ display dominance is easy: the users that advertisers want to reach are more and more easily reachable through social media sites like Facebook, not through general content offered by portals. At the same time, Google’s tight relationship with the agencies, through its demand side platform Invite Media and the Google DoubleClick ad exchange, make it a more efficient funnel for online ad dollars.”
VB: “Since the three companies will be sharing revenue from the display ads, the real challenge will be in convincing each of their separate sales teams to start selling their competitors’ ad inventory. – The partnership, scheduled to begin by the end of the year, doesn’t require that each of the companies exclusively work with each other, according to the report.”
TNW: “The ad pact will start at the end of 2011 and will not require exclusivity so each company is free to work with any ad network, even Google. I imagine it will still require a bit of training to get their internal sales teams to start selling competitors’ inventory. By banding together in Musketeer style, the three companies will share ad revenues in hopes of increasing their total earnings in Google’s shadow. The online advertising world is one of the most competitive landscapes and as companies go head to head in the language of CPM, CPC, DSP and conversion tracking pixels….it’s like the wild west for geeks out there.”
Gerrit Eicker
Yammer Goes Salesforce
WSJ: Yammer and Salesforce start collaborating regarding activity streams; http://eicker.at/YammerSalesforce
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Gerrit Eicker
WSJ: “Today Yammer will announce that it will work with another application, and it’s a big one: Salesforce.com. The folks at Yammer used Force.com, Salesforce’s development platform, and Yammer’s own API, to grab activity stream data from within Salesforce. Sales leads, deals, marketing campaigns and all sorts of other activity that gets entered into Salesforce.com become objects that can appear directly within a Yammer stream, which is essentially as easy to keep track of and interact with as a Facebook stream. … In fact, a Facebook stream is exactly what Yammer CEO David Sacks compares it to. ‘A few months ago we released an activity stream API that lets any application push activity stories into Yammer, the same way that Zynga can push items like the latest Mafia Wars score into your Facebook stream,’ he says. … The comparison to Facebook is no accident: Yammer’s technology is based on Facebook’s Open Graph protocol.“
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Gerrit Eicker
RWW: “Yammer combined its APIs and Force.com to grab the activity stream information from within Salesforce, so that these objects can now be a part of the Yammer activity stream. … Now, those astute readers may realize that Salesforce has its own activity stream microblogging thing called Chatter, doesn’t this duplicate the function? Yes it does. But the bigger issue here is that Yammer is integrating things like crazy, before other software tools put their own activity streams inside their apps, just as Salesforce has done. Yammer is adding 200,000 customers a month, according to some press sources, and now stands at three million total customers, with half a million paid ones.”
VB: “Yammer is taking a shotgun approach to gathering data through partnerships instead of building up internal tools. Box.net, another enterprise 2.0 company, fleshes out its cloud storage product by integrating applications from the likes of Salesforce.com and Google to make its software more useful for enterprise companies. Yammer still intends to integrate with other enterprise companies that also have open APIs. …Yammer, which has 3 million verified corporate users. Around 80 percent of the largest companies in the world on the Fortune 500 list have deployed the enterprise social network. It’s one of a number of stars in the enterprise 2.0 space – along with companies like collaboration service Huddle and cloud storage provider Box.net – that are taking lessons learned from Web 2.0 applications like Twitter and Facebook to the enterprise.”
GER: “Amazon sources close to the situation have told us that the company is planning on rolling out a retail store in Seattle within the next few months. This project is a test to gauge the market and see if a chain of stores would be profitable. They intend on going with the small boutique route with the main emphasis on books from their growing line of Amazon Exclusives and selling their e-readers and tablets. – Seattle is where Amazon’s main headquarters is based and is known as a fairly tech savvy market. It is a perfect launch location to get some hands on experience in the retail sphere. … The company has already contracted the design layout of the retail location through a shell company, which is not unusual for Amazon. … The store itself is not just selling tangible items like e-readers and tablets, but also their books. Amazon recently started their own publishing division and has locked up many indie and prominent figures to write exclusively for the company. … This is exciting news and Amazon in a great position to make a strong go out of their retail endeavors. They are starting out local and small mainly to test the waters with the new store, but also to figure out how they’re going to avoid paying massive taxes.”
GigaOM: “The move into retail, if it proves true, would be a big turning point for Amazon and one that ultimately makes sense though the move doesn’t seem intuitive considering Amazon’s online roots. … One of the reasons Amazon has shied away from pursuing retail stores is to avoid charging taxes, something it must do in a handful of states. But increasingly, it looks like Amazon is accepting taxes as inevitable and so there may be fewer barriers to moving into a retail stores. … The upside is that Amazon can let people get hands-on with their products, and they can provide a high level of customer service, especially for its Kindle line of tablets and e-readers. … Amazon has signed deals to get Kindles in a lot of existing retail stores but having its own boutiques could be a way to really highlight its products. … I agree that Amazon needs to think about building out its whole service. It’s not an online seller, it’s a seller. And that means you work to provide the best selling experience possible. … The strategy is not going to threaten Walmart any time soon. I don’t think Amazon wants to go the big box route… It could be that the new store remains just a test and not a long-term bet. But I still think it’s likely that we might see local Amazon stores when all is said and done.”
TNW: “If Amazon is to roll this initiative out permanently and further afield, it will have to feel confident that its profits will be bolstered accordingly, so it will be interesting to see how the associated overheads of running a store will be factored in to its launch strategy. Furthermore, this will have implications on its efforts to sidestep states’ sales taxes on the grounds that it operates online. – Back in December, we reported on eBay’s first bricks-and-mortar store in the UK, a boutique that opened for only five days and saw 2,500 customers arrive through its doors. It didn’t have any tills, and it was pretty much a ‘QR code shopping emporium’, with shoppers able to browse over 350 items provided by a selection of the top-rated eBay sellers, with purchases made using mobile devices.”
RWW: “It’s not a new rumor (it dates as far back as 2009), and it would be a departure from Amazon’s strategy thus far. In December, Launch reported the retail store rumor, adding that Amazon plans to sell its own branded merchandise. Amazon is better known for threatening real-world retail than for promoting it. But Amazon’s moves in the past few months make the strategy seem more sensible. … Amazon has avoided sales taxes by remaining a purely online retailer, giving its customers the incentive of the lowest price. But lately, sales taxes on online purchases have started to seem inevitable, as Amazon’s deal with the state of California shows. Once Amazon resigns itself to sales taxes, that’s one fewer reason not to bring its retail might into physical stores.”
VB: “Rather than being a high-inventory big-box retailer on a Target or Walmart scale, the Amazon store is said to be planned as a boutique carrying high-end, high-profit-margin items as well as the brand’s Kindle line and accessories. – In a way, it would be a bit like the Apple stores one sees in every shopping mall these days, with a few big-ticket goodies in other verticals, as well.”
TC: “This will also encourage the movement from the agent-publisher-distributor model of book publishing into a direct to consumer model that Amazon will spearhead. … As I said before, the Fire is Amazon’s Trojan Horse. However, rather than the wary hold-outs bringing in Amazon’s market by buying the fire, Amazon will bring the Trojans to their own branded stores.”
pC: “The report comes at the same time as bookstore chains Barnes und Noble, Books-A-Million and Canada’s Indigo are saying they will not carry Amazon Publishing titles in their stores, though it is unclear how that boycott will actually be carried out.“