Read original story on: TechCrunch
Amazon is now extending the benefits of its Prime membership to other digital stores, starting with British retailer AllSaints. Besides granting free next-day shipping to Prime members, Amazon is also incorporating products from AllSaints’ web store into its search results. If this arrangement continues to spread, Amazon Prime could very well become the VIP pass of ecommerce.
Read original story on: Wired
It’s been widely reported that when it comes to music, today’s teens tend to just stream it instead of buying on iTunes. The Wall Street Journal reported that digital music sales on iTunes, the world’s biggest music seller, had declined 13 percent to 14 percent since the start of the year. But what if their media consumption habit has spread to other media content as well?
During the last quarter, Amazon’s North American sales of media—books, music, movies, games—grew five percent of quarterly growth, the lowest year-over-year growth in North American media sales in over five years. If this is any indication, then it looks like younger generations are indeed choosing convenient access to media content over physical or digital ownership.
Ironically, this long-predicted shift in consumer priorities also seems to be perpetuated by the digital media sellers themselves. In the case of Amazon, textbook sales dipped sharply in part because Amazon makes textbook rentals so easy, similar to the way Amazon Prime Video discouraged DVD purchases. Similarly, Apple also has iTunes Radio for streaming music, not to mention the soon-to-integrated Beats music.
That being said, there might be a bit of over-generalization, as Gen Z evidently does still listen to MP3, paid for or not. Still, the trend towards a rental-based, on-demand economy has been a long time coming. And with the younger generations embracing such ways of media consumption, it’s time for companies built on the practice of purchasing media to reexamine basic assumptions.
Read original story on: TechCrunch
It looks like Google’s Chromecast has a new competitor as Amazon introduced the Fire TV Stick today. It is a $39 dongle that works just like Chromecast, currently priced at $35. To sweeten the deal, Amazon also throws in a free month of Prime membership, while also offering it at a discounted $19 to existing Prime subscribers. It seems to be a serious challenger to Chromecast in terms of both features and value, and we won’t be too surprised if we see an Apple TV Stick soon.
Update 10/30: The ship date for Fire TV Stick has been pushed back to January.
Read original story on: Statista
Amazon reported disappointing quarter earnings on Thursday, missing both revenue and profit estimates. And it seems like the lackluster sales of the Fire Phone is to blame, primarily. Not only did Amazon take a $170 million write-off related to the phone’s weak performance — in addition, Amazon’s prime cloud business is currently locked in a price war with Microsoft and Google. Still, the holiday season is upon us, and as the chart from Statista shows, the E-Commerce giant always bounces back pretty well during the fourth quarter, especially with three pop-up stores opening to assist the holiday shopping this year.
Source: LA Times
Following last week’s announcement of its first-ever brick-and-mortar store in Midtown Manhattan, Amazon is now planning pop-up stores in San Francisco and Sacramento, California, next week for the holiday shopping season. Different than the supposed “warehouse function” of its NYC store, these two pop-up stores will reportedly carry Amazon-branded e-readers, tablets, smartphones, and streaming media players to provide customers with an opportunity to try out its own lineup.
We have seen a lot of brick-and-mortar retailers going digital by opening online stores, but it is rare to see a digital retailer to open a physical store (Warby Parker and Piperlime are among the few who have done it). So it’s come as quite the surprise that Amazon, the No. 1 ecommerce site in the States, is opening its first brick-and-mortar store in Manhattan just in time for the holiday-shopping season. The store, located across from the iconic Empire State Building, will reportedly function as a mini-warehouse, with limited inventory for same-day delivery within New York, product returns and exchanges, and pickups of online orders. As it’s right in the neighborhood, we’ll be keeping a close eye on its development.
Amazon is reportedly preparing to expand its grocery delivery service Amazon Fresh to New York City as early as October. Going head-to-head with established services like FreshDirect, the expansion will further solidify the continuous rise of the on-demand economy. How this will impact the local brick-and-mortar grocery stores, however, remains to be seen.
Amazon is once again turning to Twitter to further the reach of its ecommerce empire. Now simply by replying with #AmazonWishList to any tweet that contains an Amazon product link, U.S. users can save linked products to their Wish List. This move follows the #AmazonCart, a similar initiative launched back in May that lets users add products to their Amazon shopping cart without leaving Twitter, now a vital cog in the global e-commerce.
Mobile and Internet service provider AT&T has announced that its new Internet plan will come with access to HBO Go and a free subscription to Amazon Prime, which also includes over-the-top (OTT) services. As TV becomes something we watch on the Internet and online video becomes something we watch on our TVs, the line between who makes and who delivers video content has become further blurred. To learn more about how such blurred line is impacting the TV industry, check out our OTT-focused white paper.
With the release of six new tablets and e-readers earlier this week, ecommerce giant Amazon has officially evolved into a “gadget company”. From refreshed low-end tablets to high-end e-readers, the company has come a long way since the introduction of its the Kindle seven years ago. And except for the $199 Kindle Voyage, most of the new lineup seems to uphold its business model—sell hardware for little or no profit, and hope to make money when customers buy content on Amazon’s platform. But as Apple has proved time after time, a true gadget company can profit from both hardware and content.
