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

To: umbro who wrote (10004)	7/11/1998 2:11:00 PM
From: BayPig	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

> I wonder if the various shopbots which seem to access the Amazon pages (and other sites) for you, count as a hit? I was wondering the same thing. It seem like it would, since I'm not sure how they could distinguish a bot accessing the site. If that is the case, the percentage of sales from the hits is likely to have decreased . Does anyone know for certain about the bots counting as hits? Also, does anyone know how AMZN accounts for the commissions paid to their associates? From their last filing, I get the sneaking suspicion that they are being accounted for as marketing expenses instead of cost of goods sold, thereby making their margins look better than they really are. BayPig

To: umbro who wrote (10004)	7/11/1998 8:28:00 PM
From: Tom D	Respond to of 164684

Gary, here are the hits for Q4 97..... Again from Relevant Knowledge. Oct 97 1,894,000 Nov 97 <1,870,000 Dec 97 2,035,000 Total for Q4 was 5,799,000. Thus a 101% rise in hits from Q4 '97 to Q1 '98 versus a 32% rise in sales. I have no idea whether or not shopbot visits are counted as hits. I also don't know how many visits to AMZN's website in early '98 were from BKS and other book dealers using AMZN's advanced search capabilities to locate books for their customers who had fragmentary information about what they wanted. When BKS got up and running, these sorts of visits (but not necessarily sales revenues) should have plummeted. It is hard to know what these website hits mean. But since they are available more often, and far in advance of quarterly revenue reports, I think them worthy of ongoing monitoring. Over time we may be able to tease some predictive value out of them. I could not insert these additional data into my copy of your table without ruining the layout. I read on this thread about a month ago, that Robertson Stevens was predicting a 20% increase in revenues for Q2 over Q1. But I think that prediction was without music CD sales. Thanks for correlating the webvisits with revenues. Best regards, Tom D