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

To: Robert Duncan who wrote (9620)	7/8/1998 11:07:00 PM
From: llamaphlegm	Respond to of 164684

RD and RS: Something about a buyer's paradise. Now why is it that I give a damn about who the book seller is with sites like these, books.com, acses.com, yahoo's cd and book shoppers??? imall.com./

To: Robert Duncan who wrote (9620)	7/8/1998 11:08:00 PM
From: JimNewby	Respond to of 164684

When comparing AMZN with YAHOO, etc, you're all right. AMZN is not a true Internet stock, but an e-commerce stock. However, everyone on this thread is at least slightly familiar with the Internet. Many (or most) investors are not. They see all these techy stocks as the same animal and want to jump on the train IMHO. Jim

To: Robert Duncan who wrote (9620)	7/8/1998 11:36:00 PM
From: R2O	Respond to of 164684

YHOO sells bits. Bits are (virtually) intangeable. Bits (can) have very high margins. The business model seems to be a classic publishing model, except for all the great differences between net and print expenses etc. YHOO sells eyeballs to advertizers. AMZN uses bits to sell books. Books are heavy physical objects. Books have gross margins of about 20%, if that. Totally different businesses. Of course, the net can make 'totally different' into 'the same' with very little notice. BTW: A local SW bookstore told me that one the their affiliated bookstores sometimes buys books from AMZN because they sometimes have sale prices less than publisher wholesale price. Perhaps a negative margin? Or does it become imaginary? Or virtual?

To: Robert Duncan who wrote (9620)	7/9/1998 1:19:00 AM
From: Michel Bera	Respond to of 164684

Robert, May I suggest that it could be unfair to tell that AMZN is not building a brand. Behind the brand, there is a huge statistical knowledge and experience that AMZN learned on all customer and transaction profiles, building datawarehouses of them and datamining them. This is building a powerful hidden knowledge on american - and international - customers that deserves valuation. A tip of this iceberg can be found with all those "suggestion tools" that are available on AMZN Web. Regards, MiB (long at $48 and holding)

To: Robert Duncan who wrote (9620)	7/9/1998 10:56:00 AM
From: Rob S.	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 164684

I think Yahoo! will (has) developed some value due to brand identity and "customer loyalty" but that does not apply to but a small portion of potential customers. As the internet grows and developers and the average mom and pop book reader comes online, I don't think they will care nearly so much that they buy things from a "cool" name. The internet will be "nice but not my life". There will also increasingly be purchasing e-BOTS that go out and search the internet for the consumer. Say you go over to Amazon.com, OnSale, EggHead or other e-commerce product site and find a product that interests you. You then jump over or show a split page of the Yahoo! or some new start-up product search engine that will provide the ability to search on that product description. In Amazon's case you can use the book's ISBN # or the book title to do the search. The search would result in a list of several merchants, the book's price, and maybe shipping cost and other information such as security methods used. Simple and already starting to happen. Internet BOTS are already cropping up and others are being developed or enhanced to allow the search engine companies to go out and search vast internet sites to build a structured database of product offerings. In this process, Yahoo! (or other e-commerce BOT company) gains revenue from the ads they subject you to while the merchants duke it out over slimmer and slimmer margins for the same commodity item. This BOT capability is already being offered by a few companies what remains is for Yahoo! or other major search firms to incorporate it seemlessly into their capabilities and into Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. Now some people will pay a premium for books and tapes at Amazon but the ease of competition, even without the use of BOTS, will make it increasingly hard for Amazon to compete effectively without offering steeper discounts. So where will the huge profits come from that will justify $6+ billions in valuation? Amazon is not in a position similar to Microsoft where they just set the price for their software and make the difference between their raw cost and dictated price. Microsoft does not have to compete against hundreds or thousands of other who offer "Hank and Hall's Windows 98+" software. Amazon only offers a generic product that they have no hand in manufacturing and no way of controlling what others charge.