Book Short: Way, Way Beyond Books The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, by Brad Stone, was a great read. Amazon is a fascinating, and phenomenally successful company, and Jeff is a legendary technology leader. The Everything Store is a company and personal biography and totally delivers. Forget about the fact that Amazon is now almost $100B in revenues and still growing like mad. I find it even more amazing that a single company could be the largest ecommerce site on the planet while successfully pioneering both cloud computing services and e-readers. The stories of all these things are in the book. As a CEO, I enjoyed reading more of the vignettes behind the things that Amazon…
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Amazon
On the Other Hand…
On the Other Hand… A couple days ago, I wrote about how crummy the customer service experience was with Clear going out of business with no notice and no apology. Today my inbox revealed the exact opposite experience: Greetings from Amazon.com. You saved $1.40 with Amazon.com’s Pre-order Price Guarantee! The price of the item(s) decreased after you ordered them, and we gave you the lowest price. I didn’t even know Amazon had a Pre-order Price Guarantee. They could have gotten away with not giving it to me, and I would have never even thought about it. Great experience!
RSS Advertising
RSS Advertising This is two-day-old news by now, but in case you missed it, we just announced than we – Return Path – are partnering with Feedburner to take RSS advertising to the next level (coverage here, here, and here). As you probably know if you receive my feed or other ones, Feedburner has been doing some experimenting with ad units at the bottom of feeds for months now, first using Amazon and more recently Google AdSense to serve up ads. And as you may know if you look at ads closely, neither of those services has done a great job making the ads truly relevant. I can’t tell you, for example, the number of times I write a posting…
A Ball Bearing in the Wheels of E-Commerce
A Ball Bearing in the Wheels of E-Commerce As an online marketing professional, I’ve long understood intellectually how e-commerce works, how affiliate networks function, and why the internet is such a powerful selling tool. But I got an email the other day that drove this home more directly. When I started my blog about a year and a half ago, I set myself up as an Amazon affiliate, meaning that any time someone clicks on a link to Amazon from one of my postings or on the blog sidebar, I get paid a roughly 4% commission on anything that person buys on Amazon on that session. According to the email report I just got from Amazon on Q2 sales driven…
Grandma Goes Broadband
I’ve always thought my grandmother was a remarkable person. At age 92 (sorry to publish it, Gma), she is pretty hip — drives a Lexus, plays a mean game of bridge, carries a cell phone, and until recently, used WebTV. She was getting tired of the slow connection via dial-up, so Mariquita and I gave her an old laptop we had and installed a cable modem (I have to commend Cablevision of Westchester/Optimum Online on a very smooth and easy installation process), so now she’s the world’s newest computer user. Those of us who work with computers every day take some of the basics for granted, but if you’ve never used Windows or a mouse before, this stuff is not…