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

To: H James Morris who wrote (125628)	5/28/2001 9:30:48 PM
From: Glenn D. Rudolph	Respond to of 164684

James, I am going to look at those audio sites. The problem now is keeping up with what I have. Small thoughts. Ebay is going to start enforcing their policy against having links to one's web site. They claim and apparently it is true, there are a huge number of sellers and buyers that meet up and do not sell the item through Ebay. I am not one of those ever. That is for sure. There is another side of the coin. A percentage of people bid and never pay. In my case, it is coming to about 15%. Ebay receives the listing fee and the selling fee unless the seller files a non payment complaint and then waits six months I believe. The listing fee is kept no matter what so there is a huge amount of fees I am sure Ebay gets to keep for sales that never really complete. I do not both with chasing after a few dollars. I am really confused regarding the problems all these on-line site had making a profit. I still believe and am quite sure that dual channel is the only way to go for products that need shipped meaning non service sales such as airline tickets. We use about 800 Sq. Ft. in one of my stores where I have "extra space" anyhow for fulfillment. The same staff as we use to sell to the walk in public to handle customer service and are operating on a gross margin of 38%. If I took a portion of the rent, payroll, advertising bascially all expenses and expensed them to on-line selling as it represents a percentage of total gross revenue, we have a net operating margin of 14%. I am mentioning this due to all the hype I have heard abount Amazon, etoys.com, pets.com, ashford.com, bluenile.com, etc. If management was so wise, why or even how could these firms burn through millions of dollars and in some cases (you know who) billions of dollars? On-line selling is increasing very quickly but it is not increasing for the pure plays. See the 2% increase in Amazon's books, video and mucic for last quarter. Yet, many do not give up on them? Particularly the fund with 50 million plus shares of Amazon. My online store traffic is up year over year about 1000%. My online sales are up close to 10,000 percent. I can't compare Ebay due to no experience in the prior fiscal year. I am going to bring up a sad thought but it has bearing on the metrics being used in the "new economy." Every on-line site (in particualar pure plays) always tout "cumulative customer counts." That is a metric that I had never heard in retail in my life prior to 1997. Sadly, two of my customer (husband and wife), were in a traffic accident this weekend and both lost their life. Both have bought on my site on-line. Do I reduce my cumulative customer count by two? Seriously, the chances of them ordering again are extremely small. This is sad and especially to place it in a financial equation since they left behind two children. However, my cumuclative customer account is smaller than the larger firms and I have a reduction by two. The point being is the metric has no merit at all. Do you know how many of the cumulative 30 million customers Amazon touts are not even a live anymore? That is not the mention those that are inactive (non repeat customers), financially no longer able to buy or simply no need for more product. I have never seen so much "crap" spewed by so many in my almost 50 years of life. The ashford.com conference call which I listened to this AM for whatever reason touted their 275,000 cumulative customers. The stock was up Friday three cents to 37 cents. The cumulative count goes back to 1998. Glenn