Your Amazon Echo speaker could be singing a new tune by the end of the month, as reports suggest Amazon’s long-rumored discounted streaming music service is set to launch in the next few weeks. [More]
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Walmart Slowing Store Openings, Accelerating Distribution Centers
By 10.6.16
It’s no secret that Walmart is gunning for some of Amazon’s customer base: gobbling up e-commerce site Jet.com for $3.3 billion, mulling the idea of investing in Amazon competitor Flipkart, launching the $50/year Prime-rival Shipping Pass, and increasing distribution channels. As an indicator of the retailer’s online-focused future, Walmart has announced it is slowing the growth of its bricks-and-mortar stores while building more warehouses to expedite deliveries. [More]
Amazon Dash Shopping Wand Now Lets Users Order Any Prime Item They Want
By 10.5.16 — Updated: 10.6.16
While Amazon has been busy expanding its selection of Dash buttons, which allow shoppers to reorder a designated product with one click, it’s also updating its two-year-old Dash shopping wand: users can now use it to order anything they want, instead of just groceries from AmazonFresh. [More]
Amazon Prime Members Will Now Have Access To Library Of Free E-Books
By 10.5.16
In its continuing quest to lure folks to sign up for an Amazon Prime membership, Amazon is throwing another perk onto the pile: free ebooks, magazines, short stories, and comics. [More]
Amazon Bans Most Users From Writing Reviews In Exchange For Free, Discounted Items
By 10.4.16 — Updated: 10.5.16
While Amazon has long looked down on reviews that were written in exchange for free or deeply discounted items, these write-ups were allowed so long as they followed the rules: The review must be honest, and the compensation must be fully disclosed. But as we showed earlier this year, a number of compensated reviewers were gaming the system — posting hundreds of reviews a month, almost universally positive, and for products they sometimes couldn’t possibly have used. Now Amazon has announced a nearly full ban on compensated reviews. [More]
Amazon Can Charge Any Subscription To Any Card You Have On File If Your Primary Card Expires
By 10.3.16
A Consumerist reader recently went to run some errands and found the charge to her debit card was declined due to insufficient funds. She was puzzled — that account should have had at least $100 in it. So why were her funds insufficient? Because her Amazon Prime subscription had renewed on that card that day — even though she’d never once set up Prime to bill to it. [More]
Google Launching Home AI Competitor To “Accidental Winner” Amazon Echo This Week
By 10.3.16
If growing up on Star Trek: The Next Generation reruns taught us anything, it’s that the future would be brought to us by computers that could recognize our voice commands and do whatever we asked. And while none of the products on the market today sound like the late Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, we are still surrounded by machine-generated female voices that answer our questions, queue up our favorite tunes, and dim our room lights on request. But the dominant player in that space is one that, just a few years ago, nobody would have expected — because it’s Amazon, not Google, connecting homes. [More]
Walmart May Invest $1B In Flipkart To Fight Amazon Overseas
By 9.28.16
Walmart’s apparent plan to become more like Amazon wasn’t realized when the company launched its $50/year Prime-rival Shipping Pass or after the company snatched up e-commerce site Jet.com for $3.3 billion. But not one to give up, the big box retailer is now reportedly in talks to invest more than $1 billion in fellow Amazon competitor Flipkart. [More]
Majority Of Shoppers Using Amazon To Search For Products, Even If They Buy Elsewhere
By 9.27.16
For years we’ve talked about “showrooming” — the practice of going to a bricks-and-mortar retailer just to look at a product you intend to buy online, and now Amazon has apparently supplanted traditional search engines as the place for most Americans to begin their product hunt.
[More]
Apple Reportedly Looking To Create Competitor To Amazon Echo
By 9.23.16
With the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, Apple led the charge to make new personal digital products accessible, popular, and now all but necessary. But the electronics giant may now be playing catch-up to Amazon in the connected-home market, as the e-tailer’s Echo device and its various spinoffs become more affordable and functional. Now comes news that Apple is looking to build a connected-home speaker/assistant of its own to go head-to-head with Echo. [More]
Amazon Wants To Take Over Your Photo Printing, Too
By 9.21.16
Perhaps you store your photos using Amazon’s Prime Photos service, or you use Amazon Drive for your disk backups. Wouldn’t it be convenient if you could just have Amazon print those photos out for you, in prints or in photo books? Today, Amazon announced its new Prints service, which is exactly what it sounds like. [More]
Job Listings, Tax Collection Give Away Amazon Plans For Stores In Boston, Washington D.C.
By 9.21.16
After starting in Seattle and San Diego, slowly coming to the parts of the country that face the Pacific, Amazon seems ready to head east. Recent developments in Beantown and our nation’s capital indicate that the massive online retailer seems ready to build new brick-and-mortar stores on the more Atlantic side of things. [More]
The First Choice Amazon Gives You To Buy Isn’t Necessarily The Cheapest
By 9.20.16
E-commerce giant Amazon prides itself on being a customer-centric company, but in Amazon’s world, that generally means encouraging its shoppers and its third-party merchants to buy more services from Amazon. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing for consumers, but it doesn’t mean that we get the cheapest prices, either. [More]
Video Shows Amazon Delivery Guy’s Friend Stealing Package Right After It’s Delivered
By 9.20.16
We’ve seen strangers and passers-by swipe packages right off the front porch of someone’s house, but it’s not as often that we find delivery workers teaming up with their friends to steal the goods they just dropped off. [More]
Colleges Give Up On Bookstores, Just Send Students To Amazon
By 9.16.16
Amazon pickup points on college campuses, which have been sprouting up at schools across the country, have two purposes: they exist to alleviate the strain that college students with Prime memberships put on campus mail services, and to help kill college bookstores. Bookstores are responding: not with price-matching or anything wacky like that, but by dropping books from their merchandise assortment. [More]
Amazon Throws In Free Access To Audible Channels, Free Audio Books As Prime Perks
By 9.13.16
In an attempt to encourage more folks to sign up for its Prime program, Amazon is throwing a few new perks on the table for members, complimentary access to the company’s new short-form digital audio service called Audible Channels, and free audio books. [More]
Amazon’s Alexa May Get The Ability To Talk Without Being Spoken To First
By 9.12.16
As it stands right now, Amazon Echo is the well-behaved child your grandparents might have approved of: it doesn’t speak until spoken to. But soon Alexa could be piping up to offer information without being prompted first. [More]
Report: Amazon To Open 100 Pop-Up Stores In Next Year
By 9.9.16
Two years after Amazon opened two real-life seasonal pop-up stores in San Francisco and Sacramento, the company is reportedly working on a plan to open 100 more of the limited-run stores. [More]
