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Technology Stocks : Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sarmad Y. Hermiz who wrote (62159)	6/13/1999 11:39:00 AM
From: Cap_Loss_Cfwd	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

>>I don't know whether you use eBay (other than as a source of shorting profits)<< Unlike AMZN, Ebay has been very good to me with no losing trades. I also actually use the service and generally like it. However, without the "myebay" feature that helps cut down on your need to wade through all the garbage on the site, ebay is useless. I consider ebay's search capability primitive as well. I have been using it mostly for the coin auctions. Good luck on your printer cartridge. THey should have sent you an email notifying you of the end of the auction or when you were outbid. This of course assumes that their systems crash didn't wipe out their email capability along with myebay The fact that myebay is out suggests to me that they lost a ton of data. I am not a real wirehead though so this is just a guess.

To: Sarmad Y. Hermiz who wrote (62159)	6/13/1999 11:58:00 AM
From: Peter Bernhardt	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 164684

I don't know whether you use eBay (other than as a source of shorting profits), but it is impossible to tell the status of your bids without the "My eBay" feature... Sarmad, I keep track of my bids this way: First, I do a search on myself as the bidder, which returns a list of all the ongoing auctions on which I have bid (you can also return a list that includes completed auctions). Then I set up a bookmark for that list. It's simple to track your auctions this way. While eBay was down, I visited the dread Amazon's auction site looking for an item I needed right away. While I could have found a half-dozen or so items of this sort on eBay, Amazon had no auctions for this item. In fact, the level of activity on Amazon's auction site is pathetic. Buyers and sellers at an auction site have separate but complimentary goals. For buyers, the goal is to have the greatest selection and buy what they want at the best price. For sellers, the goal is to attract the most buyers and get the best price. The unprecedented and unmatched level of activity on eBay satisfies these competing needs, and this is why, even with the recent breakdown, that it will be nearly impossible for any general-purpose auction site to compete against eBay. Unless eBay totally implodes (which is less likely after the recent fiasco - does anyone remember AOL's infrastructure problems of a year or two past?), Amazon's auction site will only serve as a reminder to investors of just how desperately this failing business is struggling to find alternative sources of revenue. Something, anything, to blunt the effect of mounting losses in its core business. Amazon might better consider turning its auction site into a specialized site - say, for used books. Although this seems natural and may even have already been considered, the obvious risk of this is that it would erode new book sales. And we can't have that now, can we? - Peter B