What can Amazon do to draw more customers to its Prime service, which combines shipping discounts with streaming video and other perks in a $99/year subscription? Amazon is reportedly negotiating to carry live streaming video for Prime customers, potentially including events like tennis, golf, soccer, rugby, and auto racing, [More]
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Amazon Alexa Goes Mobile, But Only On Amazon Tablets
By 9.8.16
Amazon’s 2016 strategy seems to be “put Alexa everywhere possible.” The digital assistant has been popping up in all manner of hardware of late. The newest is both the most and least surprising: the most because it’s finally a mobile device, but the least because it’s one manufactured by Amazon itself. [More]
Amazon Cuts Shipping Time For Overseas Manufacturers
By 9.8.16
When ordering a product from another country, say, China, you might expect to wait a few weeks or even a month for the product to show up on your doorstep. If you order from Amazon, it’ll arrive in five days. Or at least that’s the new deadline the e-commerce giant has recently given the makers and suppliers of small items. [More]
Why Does My Amazon Order Have A Walmart Or Target Shipping Order Inside?
By 9.1.16
It doesn’t happen a lot, especially if you’re an Amazon Prime member, but occasionally if you order an item from an Amazon third-party seller you might end up with an item shipped in a Target box, or containing a shipping receipt from Walmart. It’s not illegal or a scam, but it probably means you paid more than you should have. [More]
Lenovo Says It’s Talked With Amazon About Bringing Alexa To PCs
By 9.1.16
We’ve gotten used to Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa adding new capabilities to her repertoire, like buying Prime-eligible products, paying credit card bills, ordering pizza, and then leading workouts to exercise off said pizza, but thus far she’s done it all from within the Amazon’s line of devices like the Echo and Echo Dot. That might be changing. [More]
Amazon No Longer Marketing Private Student Loans To Prime Members
By 8.31.16
Just a month after Amazon announced it would partner with Wells Fargo to offer Prime members a discount on private student loans, nearly all traces of the criticized program have disappeared. [More]
Amazon May Or May Not Be Trying To Overtake UPS And FedEx
By 8.31.16
When you see a UPS or FedEx truck in your neighborhood on a weekday, or a U.S. Postal Service truck on a Sunday, they’re probably there with some kind of delivery from an online retailer, and that retailer is likely to be Amazon. As more of our everyday shopping happens online, someone will need to bring those items to our doorsteps, but it may not necessarily be the carriers we’re used to. [More]
Amazon Echo Will Let You Control Sonos Speakers
By 8.30.16
The Amazon Echo has a decent voice-controlled “assistant” in Alexa; too bad the speaker itself isn’t so great. Meanwhile, Sonos makes decent, web-connected speakers but without any voice control. You see where we’re going with this? [More]
Amazon Testing A 30-Hour Work Week For Some Employees
By 8.30.16
The dream of the four-day workweek is alive at Amazon, where the company is testing out a plan that has certain teams of workers on a part-time schedule. [More]
Want To Sell Big Name-Brand Products Through Amazon? There’s A Fee For That
By 8.29.16
It’s no secret that online marketplaces like Amazon have a problem with third-party sellers offering counterfeit copies of name-brand products. The company’s latest effort to cut off the stream of fakes involves charging a fee to sellers who want to include certain big-name brands in their stores. [More]
Amazon Angers Smaller Sellers With Suspensions
By 8.29.16
The pages of Amazon are full of third-party sellers using the e-tail giant as a storefront, but a number of small-scale sellers say there’s a growing rift between themselves and Amazon over accounts that the sellers claim are being suspended with little notice and few options for recourse. [More]
Amazon Wants To Show You Cars Online, But Won’t Actually Sell One To You
By 8.25.16
In yet another effort to strengthen its grip on e-commerce and infiltrate shoppers’ lives even more deeply, Amazon.com has just launched a new online car-browsing tool. [More]
Amazon Working On Discount Music Subscription Service For Echo Users
By 8.23.16
Amazon already offers Prime Music as part of its Amazon Prime subscription package, but now it looks like the online retailer is looking to offer this music streaming independent from Prime while also giving a discount to users of the company’s Echo web-connected speaker. [More]
Retailers Trying To Lure College Customers Now So They’ll Become Lifelong Shoppers
By 8.12.16
Often when a shopper is loyal to a brand, product, or company, it’s simply because they have a long history with it. That’s why retailers are trying to hook college-age students now — even before full-time jobs bring them a disposable income — in the hopes that they’ll become lifelong shoppers. [More]
Amazon Showing Off Its First Branded Freight Plane
By 8.5.16
It’s not enough for Amazon to sell folks anything from tablets to kitty litter, streaming video to bendy straws — it wants to be in control of its own shipping, too. To show off what the latest step in that plan looks like, Amazon is unveiling its first freight plane, emblazoned with the company logo on the side so no one can mistake who’s in charge. [More]
Target To Sell Amazon Devices Again
By 8.4.16
Once upon a time, you could go into a Target store and purchase an Amazon Kindle or a Fire tablet. Then a spat between the two companies led to Amazon products vanishing from Target shelves and its website. Looks like the two have kissed and made up, with Amazon items making their return after four years away. [More]
Report: Walmart In Talks To Buy Jet.com
By 8.3.16
Just a year after it launched, Amazon challenger and fellow e-commerce site Jet.com could soon become the property of one of the largest bricks-and-mortar retailers in the world: Walmart. [More]
Amazon Patents Noise-Canceling Headphones That Let Certain Noises In
By 8.1.16
It’s fun to read new patents, since they’re news about products that aren’t necessarily ever hitting the market in real life, but they could. For example, there’s the new patent from Amazon for a potentially useful product: noise-canceling headphones that cut the audio when a certain sound happens in the world around you. [More]
