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

To: Randy Ellingson who wrote (114907)	1/10/2001 7:43:41 PM
From: Glenn D. Rudolph	Respond to of 164684

Help me with that one. Of the customers making a purchase (during the Q), the average they spent was $58; how would the mean amount spent by these customers during the Q be something besides $58? What is your active customer estimate? I estimated 16.5M from the numbers above, which seems like it could be high -- I don't know. Randy, I can't truly help here because I really do not know. The mean and average could end up the same. On the other hand, we may have scenerios of someone buying a home theatre system including a large screen TV. This customer may order a variety of other items and make a total purchase of $5K. We could have a lot of people that spent $25 on two books and the prior $5K sale brings their average way up. These are extreme examples. The product mix is diverse enough in price that I do not believe I could gleen much from the numbers an average customer spent $58 and "net revenue" is about $960 million. The company could take their data and easily tell us how many active customers there were. Another missing piece of data is some people may have shopped on Amazon numerous times during the quarter. Is each time they make a purchase considered a purchase by the definition of the average customer spent $58 or are all their purchase throughout the quarter totaled up? I do show my emotional dislike for the firm. I am aware of that. I just wonder why management can't do a pre-release with the numbers that really count. Maybe something as straight forward as we anticipae a proforma loss of of 26 cents or whatever it is. We had 16.5 million active customers (your guess) that spent an average of $58 each. Our cash and securities are $1.1 billion with accounts payable of $300 million. We are talking fewer words than an explanation that losses should be around 7% of net sales. That is my gripe. I don't expect them to tip their hand to competition and say the mailed catalogues really worked and we plan to do that again or we found it was not necessary to market heavily on traditional electronic media, or the free shipping for items over $100 increased the average order size and it worked as a great incentive for customers to buy from us. Those are internal marketing data that was learned through trying various marketing technigues. No retailer wants to give away what works. The other numbers mentioned above are simple data that give the investor a better feel for how the company did. Glenn