Crained » amazon

The Borders Shortlist to insignificance

Charlie — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 16:59:09 +0000

Every few weeks Borders has an email that it sends with decent deals. Usually 20-25% off any book. That is great. But they don’t really understand me at all. Every book I purchase is either a technology or business book. And yet, unlike Netflix, Borders doesn’t know me at all. Today they put these as five items I’ll love:
1. “Apologize, Apologize!” – Here is a description: “Collie Flanagan’s life is part Grey Gardens and part The Royal Tenenbaums in this beautifully written if unwieldy dramedy debut.” Well, this couldn’t sound less like something I’d be interested in. Sorry. Strike one.
2. Sean Hannity’s “Conservative Victory” – He is insane. Strike two.
3. Giada at Home – A cookbook. Hmmm. I can’t cook at all. Strike three.
4. “Solar” – Strike four.
5. Sherlock Holmes – yes, it was a good movie. They could have thrown a dart at a crowd and found a fan of the movie.

Borders has all kinds of buying information about me. They collect it every time I go into their store and make a purchase. How? I’m a member of whatever membership they have. Every time I’m there they ask for my email in order to give a discount. How hard is it to craft an email and special deal to me directly? Apparently its really hard for Borders. Which is odd, because its super easy for Amazon. Anyone wonder anymore why Amazon gets 95% of my business and has eroded the business of both Borders and Barnes & Noble?

When a company pays its customers back

Charlie — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 05:44:56 +0000

Amazon Web Services announced today they were reducing prices because they have become so successful. Doesn’t a company usually raise prices when a product becomes extremely successful? Not Amazon. What an amazing lesson that so many companies could learn.

Here is the email they sent out to AWS customers:
“As Amazon S3 has grown, so has the number of customers storing large amounts of data in the service. To assist these customers, we are reducing the price of our 500 TB tier. We are also introducing new pricing tiers in all Amazon S3 Regions at the 1 PB and 5 PB levels. These changes reduce storage costs for multi-petabyte customers by more than 15%, and reduce the price of our highest tier by more than 50% in the US Standard and EU (Ireland) Regions.”

Simply amazing. This is how you get customers for life.

YouTube can make money or how Amazon kicked YouTube’s ass

Charlie — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 04:33:13 +0000

I have a thought on YouTube and how they can make money. Why not create YouTube Private where you can use it like Picasa and upload all your family videos with a desktop app where you upload, edit, etc. and then upload it to your YouTube storage place. Charge per Gigabyte of storage and flat bandwidth per month at different tiers.

Sure, you can put videos on Picasa or Flickr but it just isn’t the same experience of the ease of use of YouTube. Also, you could allow YouTube to store multiple versions of your video, like Picasa and Flickr does. First would be the general lower resolution version that is initially displayed and then you could go all the way up to HD. Size wouldn’t matter to YouTube when the user pays for the storage and is charged a monthly bandwidth rate.

If YouTube doesn’t do it then you might see Amazon come up with something like this–they already have the means with S3. Now Amazon just needs to add a video player and YouTube better start to worry. S3 has already become my online hard drive of choice. Also, Amazon has already been creating embeddable videos on their site for products and readers. When do they start to get into the online photo and video market? Maybe the Kindle 3 will be the key.