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

To: Glenn D. Rudolph who wrote (12223)	8/1/1998 5:07:00 PM
From: Rob S.	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 164684

Glenn, we must be doing things wrong. The number one way to riches in America is to take a company public and clean up from the public's retirement investments and speculation. The internet stocks have gone wild with speculation that has made the founders and VCs fabulously wealthy before they ever have to turn a profit. My plan to start a company are real - maybe I can still catch the wild speculation wave to ride to riches. Any potential partners out there? Maybe I'll be way too conservative to attract that much speculation . . . but the prospects are interesting.

To: Glenn D. Rudolph who wrote (12223)	8/2/1998 6:38:00 PM
From: Glenn D. Rudolph	Respond to of 164684

g. Our Employees Live in a Utopian Workplace * Evidently--at least according to her feedback that day -- it violated department protocol to provide extemporaneous suggestions about topics and titles that the rep found relevant to the customer's topic of interest. If someone expressed interest in historical fiction about the Civil War period, for instance, and mentioned James Michener's Centennial, it was apparently out of our purview to suggest that perhaps Gore Vidal's Lincoln might better suit her purposes--even though this is precisely the kind of helpful human input expected of employees in any quality bookstore. The preferred way to handle such a situation, I was advised, was simply to tell the customer how to locate and order Centennial (even if you knew that it had precious little to do with the Civil War), then include a blurb from the index suggesting he or she sign up for "Eyes," the programmed topical referral service that harangues signees from now till eternity with "helpful" future purchasing suggestions. How I "escaped" from amazon.com, Go to the link below, and click for the article in the July 16, 1998 issue with the above title: seattleweekly.com h. Our shoppers are not price sensitive. Loyal to amzn shopping experience. * Amazon better hope so, given the fairly unpleasant habit it has of marking up Out of Print books that it sells by marking up prices 200%-300%. Given that AMZN purchases all its OOP book orders from other book dealers, especially other websites such as Interloc or Bibliofind, which the customer could do as well at these sites (which are open to the public), AMZN is in danger (once consumers wake up) of losing this insanely high margin, though relatively small, segment of its business. See: www.interloc.com and www.bibliofind.com * AMZN bulls claim that consumers will not bother to bookmark other sites or entrust their credit card numbers to other book etailers just to comparison shop and get the cheapest price. First, AMZN already shares credit card information with associates and aggregating or shop bot sites such as acses.com and planetretail.com. Second, once the planetretail.com type of sites already have the credit card number once, consumers are free to comparison shop at whatever number of stores are included in the program. Their card stays with one centralized merchant and best of all a computer finds the cheapest for them! i. AMZN costs less, Best Interface & Customer Service. It's good - usually - on all three, but there are certainly problems. Business Week recently commented on music shopping at AMZN: "Surprisingly, the clumsiest site belongs to Amazon.com, the pioneer online bookseller that opened its music store in June. When I was shopping for CDs, after each selection Amazon would return me to the home page for its sister book service. More than once I ran a search for an artist before realizing that I had defaulted to the book section and Amazon actually was looking through its book catalog. Worse, while other sites showed a running tally of how much my spree would cost, Amazon told me the final only after I initiated a purchase--when I was a click away from having the order shipped." Business Week: July 6, 1998 Department: Personal Business: ONLINE Headline: TABLE: Where to Buy CDs Online SITE NUMBER OF TITLES AUDIO SAMPLES PRICE* AMAZON.COM 100,000 225,000 $306.93 www.amazon.com CDNOW 250,000 315,000 $320.18 www.cdnow.com CD UNIVERSE 200,000 150,000 $285.28 www.cduniverse.com MUSIC BOULEVARD 200,000 150,000 $295.70 www.musicblvd.com TOWER RECORDS 160,000 45,000 $319.06 www.towerrecords.com For full story, see: bwarchive.businessweek.com