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

To: GST who wrote (48047)	3/30/1999 5:22:00 AM
From: H James Morris	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

>>Nikkei ends down as jobless chill cools Dow thrill<< Gst, thanks. Not looking good. Maybe me parking $money in Japanese funds was not a good idea. @ least their liquid. If I had to get on a plane to cash them out. I'd sure would then, be concerned. Don't you think??:-)))

To: GST who wrote (48047)	3/30/1999 5:27:00 AM
From: H James Morris	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 164684

>>Amazon.com to offer online auctions by Helen Jung Seattle Times technology reporter Internet bookseller Amazon.com plans to launch an online auction site in the next several days, jumping into one of the most active areas of Internet commerce. Amazon.com's auction site will also provide a unique money-back provision to try to prevent fraud. The new site will not only increase product offerings to customers, but it also expands Amazon.com's competitive scope. Previously, the focus of the Seattle company's attacks have been on physical, brick-and-mortar businesses. Now it will include established Internet companies, including eBay, a Silicon Valley darling and the top auction site on the Internet. Auctions are the latest evolution for Amazon.com, which started in 1995 as an Internet retailer of books. Since then, the company has added music, videos and gifts to its offerings, linked with other retailers, and bought a stake in an online pharmacy. Amazon.com also has bought 50 percent of online pet-care company Pets.com a Pasadena-based seller of pet accessories, food and other products. Customers have long asked for an auction site, said David Risher, Amazon.com's senior vice president for product development. The company looked at buying existing auction sites, but opted instead to develop its own, he said. The site, which will go live in coming days, he said, will include sports memorabilia, toys, rare books and other collectibles offered by more than 100 "charter sellers." The site will also be open to Amazon.com's customer base - now more than 8 million customers, up from 6.3 million three months ago - to post their own items for sale. Commercial online auctions are drumming up more than $150 million per month in sales, said David Lucking-Reiley, an assistant economics professor at Vanderbilt University and a researcher of online auctions. The move into auctions is a strategically smart way for Amazon.com to take advantage of its massive customer base, said Kate Delhagen, director of online retail strategies with Forrester, a technology analysis and research firm. It also makes the company "a real competitive threat to eBay," she said. Amazon.com plans to distinguish its service from others by offering its "one-click" service, which allows repeat customers to buy items without having to re-enter credit-card information. It also will offer a refund for purchases up to $250 in cases of fraud, a vulnerability of online auctions in which buyers and sellers are individuals who may never see each other and usually rely on trust as a baseline for transactions. "We won't be able to control the entire experience, of course," Risher said. But that's where the guarantee comes in, he said. "For any purchase up to $250, if you're a victim of fraud, it's our problem not yours." Although the guarantee may draw customers, Delhagen said, it also stands as a considerable risk if there is a high incidence of fraud, she said. "That's the diciest part of the announcement to me," she said. Although Amazon.com may have the advantage of a ready customer base - four times as many as eBay's 2.1 million, eBay, too, has been making some strategic moves, said Marc Johnson, senior analyst with Jupiter Communications, a new-media research firm. America Online and eBay last week formed a partnership that gives the auction site access to AOL's 16 million subscribers. "The brick-and-mortar retailers got taken unawares to a great degree by Amazon," Johnson said. "I don't think that online players . . . are going to be as slow to respond." Copyright © 1999 Seattle Times Company<<