Amazon Associates is the partner program the company uses as part of its affiliate advertising programs, allowing customers to make money advertising Amazon products.
Associates can now simply click a link in the toolbar to send a link (replete with sales-y text) to Twitter as part of their shopping and selling experience. Amazon gets a sale, Twitter gets traffic, and the associate gets revenue share. What could possibly go wrong?
Linking to Amazon or other online retailers is obviously nothing new, though Amazon has been particularly successful in using its link networks for both sales and to garner higher Google rankings for organic advertising.
This new program does introduce an issue related to link fraud, where spammers and scammers leverage URL-shortening services for spam links. Currently there is no way to verify that the link you click actually goes to Amazon. It's a bit surprising that it decided to use an URL-shortener that it doesn't own, though I suppose the network effect of the URLs helps perpetuate the life of the links.
There is also a risk of nondisclosure wherein in Twitter users attempt to push products that offer some kind of gain to them that they don't clearly state to you. While I understand the argument for disclosure on blogs and media in general, Twitter remains a playground for people to post whatever they want. I highly doubt all the celebrities with accounts would bother wasting their precious time if they weren't posting for their own gain.
Interestingly, there is no mention of whether Twitter is an Amazon Associate, suggesting that Twitter won't see any of the revenue share. I'd like to think that they cut a deal that gives them a piece of the pie, but to date we haven't seen Twitter monetize itself too effectively.
Twitter is quickly becoming the flash news vehicle for everything from news alerts to product placement. And based on a very quick review of my Bitly account, Twitter users just love to click on links. But, I still have to wonder if Twitter will ever get beyond its current role as a marketing tool?
E-commerce giant Amazon.com plans to close three facilities, as the company rejiggers its distribution network, according to an Associated Press report Thursday.
Distribution facilities in Munster, Ind., Red Rock, Nev., and Chambersburg, Pa., will be shuttered, with the 210 affected employees offered a chance to either transfer to nearby facilities, or terminate their Amazon employment and receive eight weeks of severance, according to the report.
Representatives from Amazon.com were not immediately available for comment.
Amazon opened the Munster facility in late 2007, but with its closure, it will have two distribution centers in Indiana. The closure of the Red Rock facility, opened in 2001, will leave it with one center in Nevada. And the closure of the Chambersburg site, opened in 2003, will result in Amazon operating three sites in Pennsylvania, according to the report.
AUSTIN, Texas--IMDb founder Col Needham said the massively popular movie database has set as its major goal for the future to add one-button streaming for all of the 1.3 million titles it indexes.
Obviously, the vision is a long-term one, Needham acknowledged, and it faces hurdles from the slew of content owners who control the vast library of titles the Internet Movie Database provides information about, but as a leading movie-oriented site, it's a very important goal to articulate in public.
Needham was speaking Monday afternoon at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival here. Oddly, though his talk was part of the film festival, the room was packed almost entirely by attendees of the associated SXSW Interactive Festival.
Speaking at SXSW on Monday, IMDb founder Col Needham said the site hopes to eventually offer streaming at the push of a button for all of the 1.3 million titles in its database. Clearly, this vision will take some time to come to fruition.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)Ostensibly, Needham was talking about the history of IMDb--from its founding even before the advent of the World Wide Web, to its launch as a dot-com site to its being bought by Amazon.com. But late in the talk, he explained how he wants to make it possible for the 57 million monthly unique visitors to the site to watch, with the click of one button, all the movies, TV shows, and other video content indexed on the site.
It will be difficult to fulfill the vision, Needham said, "because many of the films may not exist anymore and many may not be available for streaming."
But these days, free or paid streaming of movies is available from a number of sources, including: Netflix, Hulu, TV.com (a part of CBS Interactive, which publishes CNET News), Amazon, iTunes, and others. Each of those sources, though, has its own arrangement with the content owners, so for IMDb to get access to the entire library would be a massive undertaking.
Still, rather than being a throw-away line that didn't carry any weight, Needham reiterated at the end of the talk that the vision was one of the company's major goals for 2009 and beyond.
Already, IMDb has begun adding streaming content to the site, a program that began in September. Right now, Needham said, there are 14,000 full-length TV episodes and a couple of thousand full-length movies available on the site, as well as 120,000 other pieces of video content, many of which are movie trailers, interviews, and featurettes.
And he said that the site is adding thousands of new pieces of video content per week.
At that rate, however, it's sure to take the site quite some time to achieve the goal. Needham said he imagined a time three years from now when we will all look back at early 2009, when so many media sites are trying to solve the problem of making content available to those who want it in the face of resistance from the Recording Industry Association of America and Motion Picture Association of America, and we'll shake our heads at where we were at.
"We'll laugh at how little we knew about what business models would work," Needham said.
eBay on Wednesday announced plans to revise its struggling marketplace unit, giving it greater focus on its core used goods auction business, rather than its retail business, the company said during its analyst day presentation.
The news apparently pleased Wall Street, which bid up eBay shares 4.7 percent Wednesday, as the company held its analyst day. eBay shares continued to rise Thursday, climbing 2.24 percent to $11.89 a share in morning trading.
With its announcement, eBay addresses one of Wall Street's long-held complaints that the e-commerce giant suffers from an identity crisis. Analysts have previously said that the company has struggled with a desire to stay true to its roots in offering used goods and collectibles through an auction process, yet has also wanted to compete in the fixed-price retail arena with the likes of Amazon.com and other online retailers.
(Credit:
Yahoo Finance)
In a research note Thursday, Ben Schachter of UBS Securities said:
Management acknowledged that its Marketplaces division had fallen behind in its technological aptitude and its ability to satisfy customers. The company emphasized its plan for the division to refocus on the secondary market and develop an improved user experience for the customer.
Schachter, meanwhile, remains skeptical of eBay's forecast that it can grow its marketplace division at the same pace as the e-commerce market next year and outpace the market in 2011.
The UBS analyst added:
The company is attempting to improve its user experience by expanding efforts to include more liquidation/out-of-season products and by overhauling its search function to bring more relevant searches to the forefront.
Imran Khan, a J.P. Morgan analyst, agrees that eBay's marketplace division is a wait-and-see story.
Khan noted in his analyst report Thursday that he believes the division will continue to underperform in the e-commerce market, due to several issues:
(1) low pricing strategy by Amazon, Wal-Mart and other e-commerce sites; (2) continued expansion of selection by niche e-commerce sites and (3) the continued entrance of brick-and-mortar retailers into the e-commerce space.
Cowen & Co. analyst Jim Friedland noted in his research note that competition from not only Amazon but also Google Search is a "serious threat" to eBay's marketplace business.
Amazon and Google allow sellers to post their goods to their respective sites at a cheaper cost, noted Friedland. Sellers, for example, can upload their goods to Google's product search database for free.
He further noted:
We believe the superior buying experience on Amazon and search experience on Google reduces the value of the eBay platform for buyers and sellers. Even though eBay is dedicating significant resources to enhancing search, improving the user interface and other buyer/seller features, we believe it will be difficult for the company to catch up to Amazon.
eBay also told analysts Wednesday that it plans to double the size of its PayPal business over the next three years to approximately $100 billion to $120 billion in annual payments.
Updated 5:25 a.m. PST Wednesday to note the official release of the Kindle application.
Amazon on Wednesday unveiled a free application that will allow the same electronic books available on the e-tailer's Kindle to be read on Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch.
The program will be available for download for Apple's App Store and give users access to the more than 240,000 e-books that Kindle users can buy on Amazon. The program's Whisper Sync service promises to keep track of a reader's place in their chosen book, allowing users to pick up where they left off on either device the Kindle or iPhone if users own both.
While other e-book reader such as Stanza from Lexcycle and the eReader from Fictionwise are already popular on iPhones, it is the first time that Kindle content has been made available on a non-Kindle device. Amazon Vice President Ian Freed hinted at the move in an interview with CNET News last month, and expressed optimism that some of those who try Kindle on a cell phone will ultimately buy Amazon's device.
The app release is Amazon's latest salvo for a greater piece of the e-book market. The e-tailer unveiled the second generation of its Kindle e-book reader on February 9. Amazon touted the $359 Kindle 2 as thinner than its predecessor and offering longer battery life.
But the company quickly came under criticism from the Authors Guild, which claimed the device's new text-to-speech feature would hurt sales of audio books. The trade group representing 9,000 authors argued that Amazon wasn't compensating authors for the feature, and thus violating authors' copyrights. Amazon ultimately acquiesced, announcing late last month that it would modify systems to allow authors and publishers to decide whether to enable Kindle's text-to-speech function on a per-title basis.
In launching the new app, Amazon is taking on Google, which last month launched a mobile version of its Google Book Search, giving iPhone and Android users instant access to more than 1.5 million public domain books.
Amazon.com beat Wall Street's fourth-quarter revenue and earnings expectations, as the e-commerce giant posted strong holiday sales amid a weak economy.
Amazon's revenues jumped 18 percent to $6.7 billion for the quarter compared with the same period a year earlier. Wall Street had been expecting Amazon to generate sales of $6.4 billion for the quarter, according to Thomson Reuters.
The company reported a 9 percent increase in net income to $225 million for the quarter, or 52 cents a share. Wall Street was expecting a net profit of 50 cents a share, excluding stock options expenses.
Amazon stock rose 7.5 percent to $53.75 a share in after-hours trading.
"We're particularly grateful for the unusually strong demand for Kindle in the fourth quarter," Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO, said in a statement in reference to the company's electronic reader.
During the fourth quarter, Amazon reported an 18 percent increase in U.S. and Canadian sales, compared to the same time a year ago.
Worldwide sales of its electronics and general merchandise climbed 31 percent to $2.89 billion in the quarter, compared with its performance a year ago.
The next time you feel your boss is driving you like a heartless task master, you might want to ponder the alleged plight of some poor lads in England.
Temporary workers at Amazon.com's U.K. fulfillment centers risk being terminated if they call in sick and are required to work seven days a week, according to a report published Sunday in The Times of London. Employees reportedly get only two short breaks for an eight-hour shift and must request permission to use the toilet. The temporary employees hired to handle the seasonal increase in business earn the equivalent of $10.40 an hour but must pay $13 a day to take a bus to the warehouse if they can't arrange their own transportation, the newspaper reported.
Employees are also penalized for not achieving what one manager called "ridiculous" packing quotas and are often required to walk up to 14 miles during the course of a shift to retrieve items for shipping, according to a Times reporter who went undercover at Amazon's Bedfordshire warehouse.
Amazon does not deny the report. llan Lyall, vice president of European operations for Amazon, responded to the report in a statement printed with the story:
Every single member of the Amazon.co.uk workforce... is currently working flat out to ensure that our millions of customers receive the products that they have ordered on time this Christmas. Our number one focus is our customers and everyone at Amazon works hard on their behalf.
Apparently, it's also well known that being a holiday temp is the only way to get a full-time job with the company and that competition is fierce.
Demand for permanent roles from our temporary employees is at such a high level that we no longer need to recruit externally for permanent positions. Indeed, we have already seen well over 100 temporary employees become permanent this year alone. During 2008, we have taken on over 4,000 temporary fulfillment center associates in the U.K. and are benefiting from the lowest level of employees leaving the company that we have experienced over all our 11 Christmases.
Representatives for the company in the U.S. did not immediately respond to requests for comment, but spokeswoman Patty Smith told the Seattle Press Intelligencer that there were "inaccuracies" in The Times report.
"Don't believe everything you read!" Smith said via e-mail. "There were many inaccuracies in the U.K. article. Case in point: We don't allow FC (fulfillment center) associates to work more than 6 days a week in any location--they must have at least one day off."
Update at 1:38 p.m. PDT, with additional details from the ComScore report.
Online shoppers put a stranglehold on their wallets in the first several weeks of November, marking the first historic decline in e-commerce sales, according to a ComScore report released Tuesday.
Market researcher ComScore said online shopping declined 4 percent during the first 23 days of November, compared with a comparable time period last year.
During the first 23 days of the month, ComScore said online retailers rang up a total of $8.19 billion in sales.
For online retailers, growth in e-commerce sales had been steadily declining since last December and finally slipped into the red this month, said Andrew Lipsman, a ComScore spokesman.
Gian Fulgoni, ComScore chairman, said in a statement that the recession has taken a toll on e-tailers:
Despite the recent reprieve that plummeting gas prices have given American consumers, the depressed and volatile stock market, declining housing prices, inflation, and the weak job market all represent dark clouds hanging over their heads this holiday shopping season.
With consumer confidence low and disposable income tight, the first weeks of November have been very disappointing, with online retail spending declining versus a year ago. It's also likely that some budget-conscious consumers are planning to wait to buy until later in the season to take advantage of retailers' even more aggressive discounting.
ComScore expects the combined November-December holiday selling season will ultimately break even when compared with the same two-month period last year.
E-commerce has risen 9 percent year to date, according to the market researcher. That growth rate, however, is substantially less than the 19 percent posted last year.
The results of the ComScore report were initially reported in the New York Times.
Investors pushed eBay's stock down for a third consecutive day Thursday, after the e-commerce giant reported third-quarter earnings and reduced its fourth-quarter forecast amid a meltdown in the economy.
Shares of eBay fell as low as $13.69 in intraday trading, down 12 percent from Wednesday's close. But by the market's close, eBay's shares were down a mere 2.35 percent to end the day at $14.97, as the broader markets closed out with gains.
Earlier in the day, eBay's shares were whacked as Wall Street weighed in, with a number of analysts reducing their earnings estimates and price targets.
UBS Securities dropped its 2008 earnings estimates for eBay to $1.70 a share from $1.73 a share. It also reduced its 2009 estimates to $1.61 a share from $1.73 a share and reduced its six-month price target to $17 a share from $18.
In a research report by analyst Ben Schachter, UBS noted the following:
The company reported seeing weakness in the business from mid-August on, particularly in the retail and auto verticals, and also pointed to slowing overall e-commerce trends...We expect a broader economic slowdown will serve to exacerbate eBay's primary company-specific problem area (and the main obstacle to getting the stock moving again, in our view): slowing growth in its core Marketplaces business.
Schachter noted that although eBay is making moves to stabilize and increase transactions on its site, through such plans as increasing marketing and offering coupons in the fourth quarter to sellers, Wall Street expects competition to be fierce this quarter as e-commerce players duke it out over what is expected to be sparse pool of potential customers.
Schachter further added:
We continue to view eBay as in the midst of an identity crisis, in some respects. The company wants to stay true to its heritage as the destination for buying interesting/used/value goods and collectibles through auction listings; however, it also clearly wants to compete in fixed-price listings (an area where we don't believe the company has a natural advantage) to spur growth in its core. It's exceedingly unclear if the company can do both.
Goldman Sachs, meanwhile, cut its eBay earnings estimates for the fourth quarter, as well as for the fiscal years 2009 and 2010.
Goldman reduced its fourth-quarter eBay estimates by 16 percent, to 41 cents a share, cut 2009 estimates by 13 percent, to $1.64 a share, and cut 2010 estimates by 16 percent, to $1.74 a share.
We do not expect eBay's stock to perform until investors have more confidence that the earnings it is reporting are compatible with renewed GMV (gross merchandise volume) growth; 4Q 2008 earnings weakness appears to flow from macro issues and slowing GMV, rather than from eBay transitioning its business model, which may still lie ahead.
JPMorgan Chase analyst Imran Khan, meanwhile, downgraded eBay to "hold" from "buy," as well as cut its earnings estimates for the e-commerce company for a second time this week. Khan now estimates that eBay's GAAP earnings next year will be up only 3 percent, verses his previous forecast of 15 percent.
Khan said eBay's woes lie in its technology platform:
We believe eBay's biggest challenge is an inferior technology platform, which is making it difficult for the company to compete with other e-commerce platforms, such as Amazon's. In our view, the company has yet to deliver meaningful improvements in search functionality or user experience, which we believe is evident in the inverse relationship between the listing growth rate and conversion rate. We think that if eBay fails to improve the user experience, it will inhibit future growth, even when the economy recovers.
But Brian Pitz, a Bank of America Securities analyst, believes that eBay's platform is "not broken."
Instead, Pitz noted in his research report that eBay is suffering from the same aliment as other e-commerce players, which is a lack of consumer demand in this current economic climate.
Like other analysts, Pitz reduced eBay's 2009 expectations and price target. He forecast eBay to see a 2 percent reduction in revenues in 2009 and to see its earnings per share fall by 7 percent.
Pitz reduced eBay's 12-month price target to $25 a share from $29 a share.
Meanwhile, analysts at Sanford C. Bernstein were seeing green:
We think that the sell-off was an overreaction. Management's reduction of 4Q:08 guidance was in anticipation of continuing consumer weakness, dollar appreciation, and the earnings dilution caused by the BML acquisition (expected to close in 4Q:08).
Sanford noted that it is maintaining its "outperform" rating.
Shares of Amazon.com sold off sharply Tuesday, and Apple failed to swim against the tide despite rolling out a revamped MacBook line, as the broader markets gave up gains from its stellar performance a day earlier.
Amazon trading performance
(Credit: Yahoo Finance)Amazon fell 9.93 percent to end the day at $55.86 a share, with little news out on the company. Amazon, however, is set report its third-quarter results on October 22.
Apple, meanwhile, received little love from investors, after rolling out its new MacBook lineup. The computer maker's stock fell 5.6 percent to end the day at $104.08 a share. Investors, who in general were selling off stocks across the board, may have also been less than happy that the computer maker was rolling out an under-$1,000 notebook.
Apple and Intel stock performance
(Credit: Yahoo Finance)Intel, meanwhile, jumped as much as 6 percent in after-hours trading, after reporting a 12 percent increase in third-quarter profit. Intel, which reported its quarterly results after the markets closed, ended the day down 6.24 percent to $15.93 a share, during the regular trading hours.
Tech stocks, overall, were down, with the CNET Tech Index giving up 39.15 points to end the day at 1,228.68.
The tech-heavy Nasdaq, meanwhile, closed down 65.24 points, or 3.5 percent, to close at 1,779.01. The S&P 500 fell 5.34 points, or 0.5 percent, to close at 998.01. And the Dow Jones Industrial Average dipped 76.72 points, or less than 1 percent, to end the day at 9,310.99. On Monday, the Dow was up a record 936 points.
Click here for ongoing coverage from CNET News, "Tough times for tech."
