From Briefing.com
10:44 ET ******
Amazon.com (AMZN) 74 15/16 +9 1/16: This is the first really good idea coming out of Amazon.com in a long time: renting space to other merchants. Briefing.com always loved the fact that they established themselves as "internet books" very well early on, but the later moves into broad shopping seemed unfocused. But this idea may serve to really make Amazon.com mean "shopping on the internet." Instead of selling the items themselves, Amazon.com will simply rent the space out to other merchants, who list their own items. Amazon.com will charge them an incredibly low $9.95 per month to list as many as 3,000 items, with an as-yet unspecified percentage for processing the transaction. It comes a lot closer to making Amazon.com a true mall. Who gets hurt by this? First of all, eBay (EBAY), who has many businesses paying both listing fees and percentage. Secondly, Inktomi (INKT) stands to lose, perhaps in a big way. Inktomi had been offering its ecommerce engine for a remarkable 7% of revenue, to any merchant that wanted a private label ecommerce engine. Also hurt, although they were hurting to begin with, CyberCash (CYCH). Amazon.com's mall will allow users to enter their credit card and personal information once, at Amazon.com, and shop at all the merchant sites. This was the main benefit of CyberCash's InstaBuy product. Merchants who sign up with Amazon.com won't need to buy InstaBuy now. Amazon.com now offers both the transaction capability, and some brand name traffic. On first glance, it is incredibly positive. Amazon.com's vision always was to provide everything for sale over the net. That's what the name Amazon means: a river of distribution, largest in the world. Of course, all of this thinking is predicated on the fact that merchants will indeed sign up, a conclusion that everyone has already assumed is a certainty. - RVG |
