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

To: H James Morris who wrote (12870)	8/8/1998 10:18:00 AM
From: llamaphlegm	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 164684

Barrons this week, Eric Savitz. Considering the thrashing he could have laid on this company, this is pretty mild, but we bears will take it. At least it points to: 1. the fundamental contradiction in the company's business plan (you're selling books and music and videos -- oh is that how you make money? or you're a creating a wholly owned subsid to refer folks to other shopping sites. i'm sure that AOL, YHOO, MSN, planetretail.com etc. will be delighted to offer you only the best terms on your advertising for that book store/music stroe division of your company since you're shop bot subsid now is a direct competitor) The bulls, given this acquisition, might be taken a tad more seriously if they'd at least admit that the shop bots, as the bears pointed out, are a life and death threat to amzn and all online etailers, and the fact that amzn now chooses to compete in that industry simultaneously proves the point. shop bots still threaten the core assumption that an on line e tailer can be profitable given instant price comparison. btw, savits apparently also thinks that all that "community, helping mankind" psychobabble is a bunch of cr-pola. price, convenience and service -- and if 4 or 5 big bots exist, i'll just use one or two to get the cheapest price. lp <<<One of the more intriguing events last week involved Amazon.com's purchase of Junglee Corp., a Sunnyvale, California, start-up that makes software used by online shopping sites sponsored by Yahoo, HotBot, Compaq and others. Junglee's software allows you to search easily for a particular product at multiple sites to find the best available price. Amazon says it intends to use the software to expand the range of merchandise it offers, making its site into an online shopping mall. Theoretically, Amazon could take a slice of any transaction it refers to another retailer. What they've really done is find a way to participate in-or perhaps mute-a technology that posed a real challenge to Amazon's basic business. Sites like planetretail.com, acses.com and bestbookprices.com all offer Internet shoppers the ability to do instant comparison shopping without getting out of their chairs. Even cursory experimentation with some of those sites shows that Amazon.com often doesn't offer the lowest available prices for books. Last week, though, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos hinted that Amazon intends to curb the use of Junglee software for price-shopping. "We don't think customers find price comparisons very useful," Bezos told the New York Times, apparently with a straight face. Earth to Bezos, Earth to Bezos: Of course people care about price comparisons. Ignore that obvious fact at your peril