This week is Small Business Week, and on Thursday Amazon released its first Small Business Impact Report. Its position? Amazon has been good for small businesses.

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Amazon is often blamed for the demise of the Mom and Pop store and other local and cultural icons of Main Street USA. There may be some truth to this, but it is also just as important to say that the company has helped many small and midsize businesses to grow and thrive.

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The company has launched a new store focused on smaller U.S. companies.

For many businesses, Amazon operates as both a competitor and a partner. The online giant offers a platform for companies to sell their goods while it also competes with the same companies it works with.

Now, the digital retailer has launched Amazon Storefronts, a new store that exclusively sells products from small and medium-sized businesses from the United States. It offers more than 1 million products curated by Amazon from 20,000 small and mid-sized businesses.

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The 2018 holiday season is in the books, and small to medium-size businesses (SMBs) sold big on Amazon. In fact, SMBs had their best holiday shopping season ever.

The e-tail giant itself had a record-setting holiday season as well: More items were ordered worldwide on Amazon than ever before.

But it was not just corporations like LEGO that benefitted from all this shopping. More than 50 percent of all items sold came from small and medium-sized businesses.

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Since its inception in 1994, Amazon.com has grown from a small online bookseller to an online retail juggernaut. In the second quarter of 2019, Amazon facilitated $63.4 billion in sales of everything from telescopes to toothpaste. It’s a ubiquitous part of the American business landscape, and that can either work for or against a small business owner.

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As companies like Amazon, Walmart, and Target begin to dazzle us with the growing possibility of same-day delivery, it’s becoming harder for small businesses to compete in ways that provide the same speedy delivery without relying on high-emission forms of commercial storage or transportation options like renting space in large warehouses and air delivery.

That is all now changing thanks to an organization called Ohi—a US-based warehousing and delivery service that allows small businesses to offer speedy, sustainable delivery options.

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The CEOs of Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook faced the House Judiciary Committee virtually today, where they fielded questions about whether their respective tech companies take advantage of their dominant positions in the market to enhance their bottom lines.

Spoiler: They all said they do not.

Rep. Cicilline said House Judiciary will publish a report on the Antitrust Subcommittees finding, which will propose solutions. but his hearing has made one fact clear to me: These companies as they exist today have monopoly power. Some need to be broken up. All need to be properly regulated and held accountable, he concluded.

In a world in which e-commerce has become a necessity for nearly every retailer, it can seem they have only two options: list their goods on marketplaces run by giant companies, or sell to consumers directly, hoping they will make more on each transaction despite fewer sales. In other words, either join a dominant marketplace like eBay , Walmart or Amazon —which by itself represents 38% of U.S. online sales, according to Digital Commerce 360—or hope they can find customers through advertising and word of mouth.

For many small- and medium-size sellers, a third option has emerged, embodied by the rising star of e-commerce, Shopify . This approach gives merchants access to cloud-based third-party services such as payments and fulfillment, but lets them maintain more control of their branding and customer relationships than the biggest marketplaces offer. Shoppers might not even know they’re buying something from a Shopify-powered retailer, and that’s the point.

In addition to making goods available on sellers’ own sites, these software companies—which also include BigCommerce and Magento—can perform the laborious task of listing merchandise on the giants marketplaces. By becoming hubs for managing sales through multiple channels, including social-media platforms, they represent real competition for Amazon and its ilk, potentially giving merchants more leverage when dealing with those entrenched giants.

Amazon will Freevee in den kommenden Wochen abschalten und in Prime Video integrieren.

When Amazon announced the Echo, I immediately requested access to purchase one. I read some skeptical blog posts about it, but had high hopes. We received ours back in December and since then it has become increasingly useful.

I will not list out everything we love about "Alexa", but I wanted to highlight one thing we do that has proven helpful. We have one iPad to share among the entire family and that can be problematic with 7 children. My wife came up with the idea of having the kids set a 20 minute timer on Alexa each time they begin using the ipad. It is simple and has changed our lives. The constant questions, "Mommy, can I have the ipad now," stopped immediately. And the amount of time on the iPad for each child was reduced without parental intervention.

Children are happier when they know their boundaries. This makes parents happier too. Alexa was just the tool we needed to reduce the amount of time kids were spending on the ipad and to ensure everyone has a turn.

The kids have also had their eyes opened to how easy it is to stay on the ipad for a really long time without noticing. It's a win all across the board. Thanks to Amazon and "Alexa". And thanks to my wife for the ingenious idea.

I am fascinated with the success of the Amazon Echo. A company founded on selling books has worked very hard to become a hardware powerhouse and I think they achieved that goal with the Amazon Echo. I bought an Echo to play with home automation but when Amazon posted instructions on how to build your […]

The post Building An Amazon Echo on the Raspberry Pi Model B Revision 2 first appeared on robotthoughts.

I’m a member of the Amazon “Vine Program”. If you’re unaware of it, this is a cool little channel Amazon run where top reviewers on Amazon’s website get to choose a couple of items from a pre-defined list every month, to receive for free. In return, you must review on the Amazon website at least three out of every four items you receive.

It’s a good programme, I’ve received a couple of dozen books from it over the years and it has this quality of both being free and serendipitous that book lovers should - and seemingly do - love. Publishers get lots of reviews on their product’s page, Amazon get UGC and the people who love to read and review books get free stuff. Win-win for everybody.

I’ve just received a very odd email from Amazon about it though. First, can I just say to whoever sent this out, that putting at the end:

Please note: This e-mail was sent from a notification-only address that cannot accept incoming e-mail. Please do not reply to this message

has made an error. They’ve sent it from order-update@amazon.co.uk which the above implies is you know, a fake, non-read email account. So why then is the email itself cc’ed to that address? I think somebody does read mail at that address. Smart anti-spam skills Amazon! Alas, the game is up!

Anyway, that’s not the really weird bit. It goes on:

We are contacting you to let you know that there have been some changes to the Amazon Vine Voice Participation agreement. 

Do we all get a free pony? Really, I love Amazon Vine, that’s the only way it could get better… Somehow when I get an email informing me of changes to T&Cs though, I always feel the rest of the email is going to be me being told off for something I didn’t do. It goes on:

Please note the following changes: 

1) The ownership status of Vine products and the circumstances in which you may dispose of Vine products has been clarified. Ownership of Vine products supplied by Amazon or one of its subsidiaries (such as AmazonEncore books, AmazonCrossings books and Amazon Basics) transfers immediately to you upon receipt of the item and you can dispose of them at your convenience, but you may not transfer ownership to another person at any time. In the case of products provided by other suppliers, the product supplier retains ownership for six months from the date of your review, after which you may keep or destroy the product, but again you may not transfer ownership to anyone else. 

Wait, what now? Amazon: do you know you’re dealing with people who know how to read? From http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=ownership:

ownership: the relation of an owner to the thing possessed; possession with the right to transfer possession to others

So, if they transfer ownership, they are transferring the right to transfer possession to others. That’s what the word means.

I can understand publishers and Amazon getting sniffy if review copies are flooding the market before release dates, but the answer to that is simple: make it policy that selling pre-release copies (and it’s obvious when you get a review reader copy), before the release of the actual book will result in you being evicted from the Amazon Vine programme.

I’ve never sold any of the items I’ve received on Vine. I love books, I collect books, and I’m happy that my collection grows at 2 books/month beyond what I buy at no cost to myself in return for a review on the website for the majority of them. I’ve had books I’ve loved, books I’ve hated, and books I’ve simply just not seen the point of and been indifferent to. But I have always considered those books mine on receipt, and without logging into the Amazon Vine site, I wouldn’t even be able to identify which books came from the programme any more. They do not sit on a special shelf, so when the time comes to start selling copies off, I’m not sure I can definitely state that in 10 years time I will not sell off an edition I received via Vine.

Because these books are typically first prints of first editions, if the book should become very popular, this of course means I might profit greatly from the transaction. Publishers don’t want that to happen. All I can say is, the great success of the book to get it to that point is in part thanks to us reviewers talking it up in its earliest days. Stop being so silly.

Whilst I also understand the need of publishers to make sure the hundreds of review copies they give away don’t reduce initial sales because the reviewers are all flogging them on Amazon or eBay, I think this is a little silly. Just ask reviewers to play fair, and we will. We’re not bad people.

In fact, make it a condition that selling anything within six months is a no-no. I don’t think we’d have a problem with that. But trying to redefine the meaning of the word “ownership”? That’s crazy talk.

It gets better though:

2) You may submit Vine reviews on other websites, but not to any online or offline channel that advertises or offers the Vine product for sale except in the form of a link to a website operated by Amazon or its affiliates. 

So if you get a free copy of a book from Vine, you love it, you tell all your friends about it, and you go onto forums that happen to be affiliated with Waterstone’s (or B&N in the states) rather than Amazon, you’re in breach of T&Cs.

Amazon are - I suspect - paid by the publisher to distribute their books via Vine. I can’t imagine they make a loss on it. Therefore, I can’t quite understand how it’s in the publisher’s interest for a reviewer to talk less about a book that they love. I also have no idea how Amazon intend to police this.

If I recommend a book to a friend whilst in a bookshop, do I also have to “subtly hint” in the conversation that the book is available on Amazon.co.uk don’t you know and that Amazon is really good, or is discussion of the book whilst in a bookshop to be met with a mute indifference by me? If not, it possibly means I am submitting a review in an “offline channel” in a context that “advertises or offers” the book for sale in a form that isn’t a link to Amazon.

My friend might actually buy the book on my recommendation right there and then. How is it in the publisher’s interest that I refuse to discuss it. What if I forget that I originally got my copy on Vine and the Amazon police are around the corner and get to hear of it? Will I be punished?

These two combined make the Vine programme a little more crazy than I thought, when you try and stick to the letter of the T&Cs as opposed to perhaps the spirit.

On receiving a book, I can only discuss it on Amazon or Amazon-affiliated websites and nowhere else and I must keep the book for ever more and not sell it, give it away, donate it, or let anybody else consider it theirs until the end of time.

I am permitted however, to set fire to it. Book-burning: the kind of party Amazon Vine approves! Just you know, don’t talk about the books unless you have a laptop open nearby with Amazon.co.uk up…

I ordered up two books last night on Vine I am looking forward to receiving. I suspect they may be my last. I simply can’t see how I can commit to complying with those two conditions in a sensible way until the end of time, and I’m not somebody who likes to know he might be breaching an agreement unintentionally.

Maybe one day somebody will see sense at Amazon or at the publishers and they’ll make this all a lot simpler: don’t sell the books within six months, and whilst you’re free to talk about them wherever you want, your first and primary review should be submitted on Amazon. Simple.

Learn how to use a Google Sheet to track product prices on Amazon shopping websites and get email alerts when the prices go down or up.

The post How to Use Google Sheets as an Amazon Price Tracker appeared first on Digital Inspiration.

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This week Amazon announced the launch of a podcast service integrated with Amazon Music, along with a slate of exclusive celebrity-driven shows. After nipping around the edges of podcasting in its Audible audiobook subsidiary for a few years, Amazon is jumping into the market—with its competitive sights set squarely on Spotify. Amazon’s emulation of Spotify’s podcast model has implications for the future of podcasting as a business.

Spotify started moving into podcasts about five years ago. This was the first phase of a campaign to diversify its business beyond music, reducing its exposure to competition from much larger companies that do not depend on music as a single input good.

The deal, valued at $300 million, is the latest in a string of acquisitions as streaming platforms expand beyond music and video.

Amazon has long owned Audible, the audiobook titan that dabbles in podcasting, but only very recently began to work its way into the podcast arena. Just this September, Amazon Music launched podcasts, in an effort to boost one of the truly struggling arms of the company. For whatever reason, Amazon Music streaming has not been able to maintain a foothold as a competitor to Spotify for Apple Music, in the same way that Prime Video contends with other top video-streaming services.

Amazon - Latest Bargain Books!

Amazon - Hot new deals on games!

Here’s a little productivity hack I’ve come to rely on just about every day to keep me sane — using Amazon Alexa to add a todo to a list wherever you are in the house. Are your hands too occupied to type or write down an idea? This productivity tip has got you covered. Users […]

The post Productivity Tip: Using Amazon Alexa to add todos hands-free first appeared on Tom Markiewicz.

Free Amazon Prime Membership for Students.

Ob sich Angebote tatsächlich lohnen, offenbart nur ein Preischeck. Wir nehmen ausgewählte Amazon-Angebote zu bekannten Smartphone-Modellen unter die Lupe.

(Telecompaper) Samsung Electronics has announced new methodology for measuring the emissions and reductions linked to the use-phase of internet-connected electronic devices...

Amazon.com stopt met zijn Freevee platform voor gratis video streaming content. Het bedrijf verplaatst de content naar zijn Prime Video site, als onderdeel van een bredere strategie om het platform te veranderen in een aggregator van gratis en betaalde video-opties.

De drie grote Amerikaanse hyperscalers, Amazon, Microsoft en Google, lijken een wapenwedloop te voeren om hun netwerken wereldwijd uit te breiden. Zowel de cloud als specifiek de zware belasting van AI vraagt daarom. Het is een trend die vooral sinds begin dit jaar zichtbaar is...

When Dave Chesson was in the US Navy, he would spend lots of time away from his family. And he hated it.  He decided to create a portfolio of niche sites in an attempt to earn enough to quit his…

The post How Dave Chesson Earns Up To $14k/Month Publishing Books on Amazon appeared first on Niche Pursuits.

The iPhone could finally show you how long it’ll take to finish charging. Code spotted in the second iOS 18.2 beta by 9to5Mac shows a new “BatteryIntelligence” feature that will let you […]

The post Apple to roll out ‘Battery Intelligence’ for iPhone, Amazon slashes price of 43inch Hisense smart TV to £228 appeared first on Tech Digest.

Amazon Fire TV Commercials Guide Understanding Amazon Fire TV advertisements is essential for maximizing their marketing potential. This guide provides a comprehensive overview of the various ad options on Amazon Fire TV, including inline ads, feature rotators, sponsored screensavers, and sponsored tiles. It also explores targeting and personalization features to tailor advertisements to [...]

Amazon Ads Dashboard Overview Streamline your advertising strategy with the Amazon Advertising Dashboard. Learn how to monitor vital campaign metrics, create customized reports for deeper insights, and refine your tactics for maximum effectiveness. This article guides you through the dashboard's powerful tools, including customizable data widgets, advanced analytics, automated reporting, and seamless integration [...]

Random Photo: My Amazon Delivery

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Amazon is cracking down on pirate streaming apps that offer unauthorized access to Prime Video content. The company recently filed DMCA takedown notices with GitHub to remove APKs associated with popular apps such as PikaShow, Castle, and FlixFox. Interestingly, the takedown requests were made on behalf of Amazon Seller Services, an Indian subsidiary not typically linked to Amazon's streaming platform.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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