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

To: Alomex who wrote (151059)	12/27/2002 4:37:49 PM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Respond to of 164684

Question is, why would a retailer list its wares right next to the competitors so people can compare prices and pay Amazon sales commission in the process? Yeah that is the big issue for e-tail and b2b. But it is not so clearcut, you will notice if you spend a lot of time on the amzn site. Something that happens a lot is, Amazon has an electronics item- circuit city has a similar item, this shows up in the general search. When you click on the actual item, the "z-shops" vendors show up, a lot of whom are selling used or refurbished goods. There aren't too many cases where amazon and Circuit city have the exact same thing. If they do the differentiator is available pick-up and return (Circuit city). As far as the overvalued argument goes, I agree with you we have beat this issue to death. There was a large disagreement earlier this year wrt whether amzn was "just a retailer". That seems to have been resolved as a no. Now the issue is, where is the growth going to come from. Imo amazon will be much more successful internationally than ebay, I think intl will drive amzn growth. The reason I think amzn will eclipse ebay overseas is because ebay never achieved their dominance technically... their site is not much, it was always a first-mover story for ebay. Amazon otoh provides a superior online experience. I don't think international vendors will have any easier time copying Amazon and cutting them out of the picture than Toys r us and Circuit city did here.

To: Alomex who wrote (151059)	12/28/2002 2:54:00 PM
From: GraceZ	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

Question is, why would a retailer list its wares right next to the competitors so people can compare prices and pay Amazon sales commission in the process? I think you are looking at this as a commission when actually what the traditional retailer is paying AMZN is a fee that is lower than the cost of putting their own site up and operating it. They are being driven to AMZN because AMZN can use it's expertise and scale to lower the operating cost of an online store. Because the fee is lower, the retailer can offer more competitive prices, not less competitive ones. Plus, even if Amazon came to dominate this sector of the market all they would be doing is taking a percentage of the profits from already established retailers, with cutthroat margins. Online retail is growing at what a 30% yearly rate and traditional retailing is growing at what rate? The traditional retailers don't have a choice about offering their wares online. All retail operations are heavily dependent on growth and online is the only area that is consistently growing, stop growing or even slow the rate of growth significantly and you die a slow KM like death.