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I am wrapping up my how-much-more-could-you-possibly-be-writing commentary on our Catalyst conference in Pinehurst with Amazon SVP Sebastian Gunningham’s overview of Amazon’s growth model. While not intentional, it does fit nicely with Amazon’s recent earnings announcement of another great quarter of “we’re grabbing more e-commerce market share” 31% growth in the US.

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Amazon reported earnings tonight after market close and there are a few interesting highlights:

• Sales in North America are up 31%, International grew 41%. That’s about 13% (in the US) more then the anticipated 18% YOY e-commerce growth rate for 2008. Continuing to gain share of the overall pie.
• Fulfillment By Amazon adoption grew 50%, showing strong momentum. Probably a result of both good media coverage, sellers competing with FBA listings (tough one) and resigning to “if you can’t beat them, join them” and Amazon sales efforts (one seller on a Yahoo! store sent me a note that he was contacted by Amazon on basic fulfillment opportunities).
• Media as a product category continues to shrink with only 28% growth (CE/general merchandise grew 56%). Points to growing 3P sales as a share of overall revenue.
• Amazon’s “developer network” grew 10% to 370,000 developers in the last quarter. As opposed to eBay’s developer program which is laser-focused on growing traffic and sales, this is cool to see but really doesn’t have a significant impact on merchandising revenue on Amazon.

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2.9

As promised but long delayed, here’s the second part of my ChannelAdvisor Catalyst US thoughts and observations.

Amazon Enterprise

• Before WebStore there was Amazon’s enterprise platform, essentially managing a retailer’s e-commerce business and the foundation on which WebStore was built. Not all that well known since this is really only an option for a very small number of large online retailers.
• Great examples are Marks & Spencer and Target.com.

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Randy Smythe has a good article on his blog on how to successfully (profitably) sell media on Amazon even if your competitors are offering their products for $0.01. Of course if he keeps sharing this information so freely he may end up getting a lot more competition (which he’s aware of).

Interestingly enough I spoke to a media seller a few months back who was using repricing software to stay competitive and we found several of his products at $0.01 - the software had essentially failed to price back up. So some of the competition may not be intentional.

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2.9

Amazon is looking for more feedback from sellers on why you sell on Amazon, where else you may be selling, what percentage of your inventory you’re offering on the site (if not all, why not?) and your Amazon business goals. Click here to take the survey.

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2.9

A high-degree of customer service is an absolute must on Amazon. Well, really with any transaction, online and offline. But while it is simple to do when you have the means to automate it, still not a lot of Amazon 3P sellers use every opportunity to touch the buyer to (a) ensure they know what is going on and leave you good feedback and (b) make a brand impression.

If you want to know what this could look like, here’s a good actual example of an email sent by an Amazon seller to a fellow ChannelAdvisor co-worker: Read more

Here are a three interesting articles on Amazon with its Q1 earnings coming out next week (April 23rd). In particular I recommend the Fortune article which pegs Amazon’s total share of US online retailing at 6%, up from 5.1% in 2006, and gives more information on its German, UK and Japanese sites (each is about $1.5B in revenue, or 10% of total global revenue of nearly $15B) which is not something Amazon shares.

• The charmed life of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos
• Amazon Takes On IBM, Oracle, and HP — distraction?
  
• Peter Gabriel to take on Amazon’s recommendations

The launch of The Filter is interesting since it has already accumulated over 50M transactions on which to base its recommendations. That is one piece where I wonder if Amazon should find a way (beyond its Webstore product) to share product recommendations outside of Amazon, and ultimately drive traffic back to the site. Maybe a recommendation catalog based on UPC or even ASIN that I can query through Amazon’s web service platform?

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2.9

Okay, so it’s been almost a week since my last post. Have been out (at the beach) but am working on the follow-up posts to our Catalyst conference with more Amazon insights, but wanted to call out two things in the meantime:

• I have started twittering on Amazon at www.twitter.com/amazonwire. The aim here is to share real-time updates and information on anything Amazon.com.
• Next week is ChannelAdvisor’s Catalyst conference in the UK with staff from Amazon’s UK team present. If you have questions or concerns about selling on Amazon, this is your time to engage them. I will also attend and will share any noteworthy information here.

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2.9

This past week we held our annual ChannelAdvisor Catalyst conference in Pinehurst, North Carolina, with 500 online retailers, solution providers and the leading e-commerce players (eBay, Amazon, Google, Overstock, Facebook, etc.). Amazon SVP Sebastian Gunningham, responsible for all third-party business worldwide, brought his team to Pinehurst and delivered a keynote address Thursday morning on Amazon’s products and strategy (not available online but if we do share it you’ll read it here first …).

I am going to summarize my key take-aways from his presentation, discussions with Amazonites as well as thoughts and insights from attendees over multiple posts simply because it otherwise would turn into a War & Peace post (and it’s already late). If you’re interested in other non-Amazon thoughts / lessons from the conference I will post a review on the main ChannelAdvisor blog over the next few days. Read more

Via SeekingAlpha comes news that Amazon has launched TextBuyIt, a new SMS shopping service that enables consumers to purchase from the extensive Amazon catalog via a mobile device. Simply SMS a UPC or ISBN number to Amazon (SMS number 262966) and receive the first two items (if Amazon offers it).

I queried for a book with ISBN and received a quote within seconds along with commands to buy the item, get more details on the book and see more results. Without 1-Click you will be asked for your Amazon email address and ZIP code, and then get a call on your mobile to payment and shipping details.

The service is free and has been live in Japan for a while but of course there may be additional charges for sending an SMS from your mobile operator. Amazon has plans to put a richer user interface on this somewhat dependent on the adoption, but no timeline is known.

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2.9

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