Online Sales
February 24, 2015
Online college textbook rental company Chegg is getting out of textbook ownership to stay in the textbook rental business.
Chegg, which competes with Amazon on physical textbook rentals but preceded Amazon into the rental market by several years, has cut a deal with Ingram Content Group. Ingram, a well-known book distributor, will take over responsibility for buying, warehousing and shipping the physical textbooks, with the phase-in beginning May 1 and complete by the end of 2015. Chegg will continue to market its textbook rental service, but essentially Ingram will handle all actual textbook purchases and fulfillment.
February 18, 2015
Ten years ago this month, Jeff Bezos announced Amazon Prime to the world. "It's simple," he wrote in a letter posted to Amazon.com. "For a flat annual membership fee, you get unlimited two-day shipping for free." It's funny to look back and see how Bezos baked a little marketing sleight-of-hand right into the product launch-the shipping is not really free, after all, if you're paying a fee. But one piece of what Bezos promised has held true for the past decade: For customers, Prime turns out to be dead simple.
February 17, 2015
Family Christian Stores (FCS) has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Yet the ministry assured customers yesterday that it "does not expect" to close any of its more than 250 stores or lay off any of its approximately 4,000 employees.
"We strive to serve God in all that we do and trust His guidance in all our decisions, especially this very important one," stated FCS president and CEO Chuck Bengochea. "We have carefully and prayerfully considered every option. This action allows us to stay in business and continue to serve our customers
February 13, 2015
Jet.com, a soon-to-start online marketplace that aims to loosen Amazon's grip on e-commerce, said Wednesday that it had raised $140 million in a new round of funding.
The investment, led by Bain Capital Ventures, values the company at almost $600 million, according to people briefed on the funding round - an unusually high valuation for a start-up that has not yet opened for business.
Other venture capital investors, including Accel Partners, General Catalyst Partners, Goldman Sachs and Google Ventures, also participated in the funding, which follows earlier investment rounds totaling $80 million.
February 11, 2015
If there's one key ingredient to Amazon's long-term success as an e-commerce powerhouse, it's customer loyalty.
And if there's one foolproof way to establish customer loyalty, it's to hook them while they're young.
Enter Amazon@Purdue, Amazon's brick-and-mortar outpost on the Purdue University campus in West Lafayette, Indiana. It's the latest to come out of the Amazon Student initiative, which discounts the perks of Prime for the higher education set.
February 10, 2015
When it comes to online retail in China, Amazon is a distant runner up to the bevy of ecommerce sites owned by Alibaba, and now the two will be competing even more fiercely in smartphones.
On Sunday Alibaba announced a $590 million investment in Chinese phone-maker Meizu. The terms of the deal were not disclosed (other than that it was a minority investment), but the press release does hint that the two companies "will collaborate at both strategic and business levels to achieve a deeper integration of Meizu's hardware and Alibaba Group's mobile operating system"
February 10, 2015
When I was a publisher, we loved Tesco. It didn't sell a wide range of books, but if you could get one of yours on to its shelves, it sold in the tens of thousands. You could base your whole year's finances on getting one book on Tesco's list - and many did. At one point, we even mocked up a range of "Tesco Value" book jackets, complete with blue-and-white-striped livery. It was a bit grim, to be honest. They were desperate times for small publishers. Now, however, it's the retail giant which seems to have the adjective "struggling" permanently affixed to it.
February 3, 2015
Last week, author advocate Porter Anderson wrote a piece on book pricing called 'Who Decided Our Worth?' Do Free Books Give Away Authors' Value?, in which authors like Roz Morris, Henry Hyde, and others try to build the case for book prices that reflect an author's "value" and "worth." Hyde goes so far as to claim that he doesn't "want the kind of audience that expects free, or even heavily discounted" books, and that "the rise of Kindle is that it has given the audience a sense of entitlement where none should exist."
February 3, 2015
The e-commerce giant has inked deals with three major universities to run websites selling all sorts of college students' delectables, including textbooks, college-themed apparel and ramen noodles, the Wall Street Journal reports. Students at Purdue University, the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the University of California Davis can use the new co-branded website to place orders.
The campus initiative gives unlimited next-day on-campus delivery to Amazon Student Prime members (quicker than the two-day delivery for regular Amazon Prime customers). Also as a part of the deal
February 1, 2015
"Know your audience" is a common maxim among writers, one that pushes them to deliver the most useful or entertaining content they can for their readers. Yet knowing one's audience in a precise way has been a difficulty for book publishers up until fairly recently. Except
