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

To: Glenn D. Rudolph who wrote (4369)	5/15/1998 3:08:00 PM
From: Candle stick	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

I just did a search for one of my favorite books on acses.com an internet shopping robot. It took about 35 seconds. AMZN came in fourth at $52.91 and shipping was indicated at 3-7 days. amazon.com Spree.com came in first at 46.92 with 2-3 day shipping. spree.com spree.com I had never even heard of Spree until 2 days ago, and here they are showing up at #1 and thier site looks about the same as AMZN to me. And they were 9% cheaper than AMZN. Another try took 52 seconds and found: All Direct books alldirect.com All Direct Books was $52.70 and AMZN was $56.45, once again with 3-7 day delivery. Again that is over 9% less than AMZN. I think that is a lot and this is for two fairly easy to find books on trading. If I were to buy 4-5 books this way I could easily save 20-30 dollars, perhaps more if any are specialty books. That adds up to at least one more book free for every 4-5 I buy through acses.com. I think that is a very big difference, and will definitely sway the repeat buyers who buy a lot of books on line. And that is what its all about, right? Getting repeat business? How can AMZN do this with this kind of shopping "bot" free to everyone? Keep in mind that Acses is just ONE....many more are here and coming. I understand that both Yahoo and Excite have shopping search engines of their own, although I have not yet tried them. I see a bleak future for a retailer of commodity items, which is how I define AMZN ...........;^)

To: Glenn D. Rudolph who wrote (4369)	5/15/1998 3:41:00 PM
From: Candle stick	Respond to of 164684

Another great post from the MF about shopping robots online: Subject: Re: About the shopping robots...... Author: Trick Date: 5/15/98 3:09:40 PM (ET) I'm investigating the use of 'bots to beat the price of our university bookstore on texts I use in my classes. I compared two books for next fall, purchasing 25 copies and it took about 30 seconds for each search. Buying at a store besides AMZN saved the students a total of $1175 for the first book, and $500 on the second. The AMZN price is the same as the bookstore would charge, so this represents no savings. Buying from stores other than AMZN does provide substantial savings. I'm waiting to learn if the cheapest stores can really deliver. Rick