4. A 5 Forces Analysis:
1. Intensity of competition.
a. All mortars & brick stores which some people who like reading books, may actually prefer as they can browse in a store and check out a book's contents before buying. BKS and BGP have operating profits, rather than amzn's losses, which they can plow back into development and advertising of their web site.
b. On the web: For starters, check out -
yahoo.com
or
The Textbook Cellar, 'Your Underground Bookstore,' Hits the 'net. biz.yahoo.com
The Cost of a College Education Just Got Cheaper; The Textbook Cellar, 'Your Underground
Bookstore,' Hits the 'net.
2. Almost no barriers to entry.
AMZN fans point to the headstart and the branding advantage. Maybe, but when you can price shop between Barnes & Noble, Borders, AMZN and dozens of other reputable places, who cares about where you bought the book from. War & Peace is War & Peace is War & Peace.
3. Leverage of Suppliers
High. They can cut out the retail middleman. See announcement above.
4. Leverage of Customers
Even Higher. Real time price cutting. Someone alert the world that e-commerce is a revolution for the individual customer, not the retailer, because of #5.
5. Threat of substitution.
Higher still.
a. Shop bots aka Shopping agents. Go check out books.com, acses.com, or
SEATTLE, June 3 /PRNewswire/ -- go2net, Inc. (Nasdaq: GNET - news), a network of premier niche Web sites, today announced that it has launched WebMarket (http://www.webmarket.com), a one-stop comparison shopping resource. WebMarket gives online shoppers the ability to compare product pricing from multiple sites in a single search, and provides reports and ratings on the merchant sites.
* USA TODAY to provide book content for book comparison shopper Acses
July 29, 1998
URL: acses.com
Arlington, VA / Ludwigsburg, Germany -- July 29, 1998 - USA TODAY Online
and Acses today announced that they have signed an agreement to feature USA TODAY's bestselling books lists on Acses' website. The content will be added to the site on August 10, 1998, along with the launch of Acses' new book browsing section. The cooperation will add significant value to the Acses website and will promote USA TODAY's bestseller lists to a big audience of book lovers on the Internet.
.
Until now, visitors of Acses were able to locate books only by title, keyword, author or ISBN search. Therefore, they had to know exactly which book they wanted in order to find the best price on the Internet. The new book browsing section will drastically increase Acses' value for users who have not decided on a book. Acses will launch its new section with USA TODAY's weekly bestseller lists for Top 10 Bestsellers, Business Book Bestsellers and Audio Book Bestsellers. Acses plans on adding features like book reviews, book recommendations and database searches in future. Visitors using Acses simply select any book by title, author, keyword or ISBN search and the Internet software robot then automatically visits all online bookshops simultaneously to retrieve the current prices for this book from each store. Availability, shipping costs and shipping times are taken into account as well. After a few seconds, Acses presents a table of all offers, sorted by price.
According to Yahoo! Internet Life, which has rated Acses one of the 50 most useful sites, "Bargain hunting for books online has never been easier".
* biz.yahoo.com
Thursday July 30, 6:33 am Eastern Time
Company Press Release
The Dialog Corporation Launches E-commerce Strategy
- Leading Online Information Provider Leverages Proven Data Indexing, Search, Retrieval and Alerting Technologies in
Business-to-Business and Consumer E-Commerce Markets -
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. & LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 30, 1998-- Leveraging its leading global market position in the provision of online information, as well as extensive service and technology strengths in electronic data indexing, searching, retrieval and alerting systems, The Dialog Corporation plc (''Dialog'') (NASDAQ:DIALY - news) unveiled today its plans to aggressively target the electronic commerce (''e-commerce'') marketplace. With a strategic
focus on business-to-business applications that leverage Dialog's service, alliance and customer base, the Company is also targeting the consumer e-commerce arena with today's launch of Planet Retail (http://www.planetretail.com), an Internet-based comparative shopping service for consumers.
Consumer Market
In the first phase of the Planet Retail service, in partnership with Junglee Corporation, users are able to search the Internet through Planet Retail's user-friendly, point and click interface, to determine the best available on-line prices from approximately 100 Internet retailers in 11 main categories, from books to clothing to electronic products. Planet Retail allows users to quickly search and select products based on information such as brand names, product types and price. The user is able to sort the resulting table of matching goods by any of the available criteria, such as price, brand, or the merchant providing the goods, and links are
provided to enable the user to order the goods from the merchant.
Initial participants in this phase, which will be entirely sponsored by advertising, include global retailers such as Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, CD Now, Dell Computers, Eddie Bauer, FAO Schwartz, Gateway2000, J C Penney, Land's End, Music Boulevard, The Gap, Wal-Mart, Disney, Office Depot and Office Max. The full list of participants is reviewed below.
The second phase of Planet Retail will add the capability for consumers to effect purchases with a broad range of retailers directly from the Planet Retail site.
Planet Retail will provide confirmation receipts from all retailers and total the expenditures from within the service, relieving users from entering credit card information for each retailer.
* nytimes.com
July 30, 1998
The Robots That Rummage
By TINA KELLEY
Instead of letting their fingers do the walking through the Yellow Pages to get information from merchants, many consumers now let a software robot do the crawling to find bargains online. So-called softbots, or bots, search Web sites at once. They can reach into the more obscure crevices of the Internet as well as regular Web pages. One of the more useful bots is www.acses.com, which will search about 25 online bookstores for titles. It first displays how many vendors have been polled and how long your search will take. The results are listed from cheapest to most expensive, with prices, delivery costs and estimated times of arrival. Jango, one of the earliest softbots, presented quick information on computers and fragrances recently on thisuser's first experiments with it. But the results could not be replicated in later tries, probably because of snoozing servers or shifting availability. Jango goes to several hundred stores and review sites and some auction sites. "What's really nice about Jango is you're contacting sites in real time so you can get up-to-the-minute information," said one of Jango's inventors, Oren Etzioni. "That's important with stores and essential with auctions. Others get the information once a night -- every night you send a copy of your catalogue to the softbot -- which means the information will not be as up to date."
Another softbot, Junglee, provides six sites for searching -- Web Market, Yahoo Travel, Yahoo Visa Shopping Guide, Hotbot, Snap and Compaq -- though it can be hard to tell which one is best for a particular item. The Compaq site, for example, has searchable categories ranging from apparel to outdoor gear, as well as electronics. A downside to the bots: you do not always know if you are surfing the entire Web or just the merchants who have paired up with particular search sites. Jango is working on a version that will allow shoppers to order from within Jango without going to the store's ordering page. So where's the superbot that searches all these sites, then searches your house or apartment to see what you really, really need?
* nytimes.com
"Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood: A Novel,"
by Rebecca Wells, paperback
Sites Sampled : www.amazon.com, acses.com, www.books.com.
Range of Prices : $11.90 to $35.99 (including various shipping methods).
Where Purchased : www.books.com via Acses shopbot.
Why We Chose This Vendor : Best total price, and United Parcel Service delivery was quick enough.
Cost and Delivery : $8.05 plus $3.95 for U.P.S.; arrived after seven days.
In Real Life : In the same amount of time, I could have walked in the sunshine to a friendly liberal book cooperative in the neighborhood, heard about the latest boycotts and spent $13.45 retail (plus 8.6 percent sales tax).
Comments : The shopbot at Acses is very handy for comparing prices as well as shipping and handling costs. Yellow lettering will annoy some AOL users. The price was actually lower than advertised on Acses.
b. Virtual Malls.
Check out imall.com./. or planetretail.com
Zapata may not be the ideal company to implement the strategy, but the CEO has a point when he noted that as "the Internet grows one has to question the ultimate fate of portals that merely point users to other sites . why should we build up name recognition to give away 90% of the business to the competion (via links to our name).
All you need is MSN, Yahoo, AOL, XCIT, LCOS, et al to sponsor their own virtual malls, not limited by a particular store, but simply but area of shopping interest. 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 or a YHOO!-linked shopping agent will comparison shop for you and get you the cheapest deal. YHOO gets its cut of the sale. Voila. The particular merchant is irrelevant, particularly in a commodity business like books or cds. In this process, Yahoo! gains revenue from the ads they subject you to while themerchants duke it out over slimmer and slimmer margins for the same commodity item.
* IBM's Institute for Advanced Commerce finds that,
"In the simulated e-commerce tomorrowlands being created in the research labs at IBM Corp.,
vicious price wars are breaking out, sending vendors out of business and eliminating whole
categories of products that people actually want to buy."
"Shopping bots are emerging today as targeted Web crawlers that scour the Web and automate
comparison shopping on similar products among multiple vendors. But researchers at IBM's
Institute for Advanced Commerce, a think tank launched in January that mixes corporate
researchers with academic economists and computer scientists, predict this group will mushroom and rapidly evolve to the point that competitors will respond to one another's price changes at the speed of a Net connection.
zdnet.com
Books:
yahoo.com
books.com and then
click on the button that says "compare prices"....you will see both AMZN and BKS prices...if either is cheaper, click the next button for the 'new' price and Voila! Books.com beats the
competition....everytime. This isn't "everyday low prices" updated weekly (and brutally) by Wall-Mart, this is absolute, complete, nano-second lowest prices, or www.margin_destruction.com.
acses.com which is a shopping bot that will search 28 bookstores for the best price....
bookpool.com
CMPExpress.com Books Offers:
Fast new Search Engine with "one-click" comparison to Amazon.com.
Priced 5% less than Amazon.com including shipping.
Books shipped direct from world's largest book distributor.
main homepage at cmpexpress.com
Try bookwire at bookwire.com and select one of the hundreds of specialty sellers to get your book.
CDs
shopguide.yahoo.com is a shopping agent that will comparison shop for you.
shopguide.yahoo.com lists 15 different music sites to shop at. AMZN is not one of them. |
