Summary of noteworthy articles and events on Amazon for this past week:

New Amazon Seller Central Help — Amazon has significantly overhauled its seller help documentation. Not only are topics aligned with the order life cycle, but the topics themselves are more self-explanatory. Faster learning = faster selling = more revenue.
Amazon to launch streaming media — [...]

Quick summary of interesting Amazon-related news / events for this past week:

Great new Amazon MP3 Widget for Amazon Associates that allows your visitors to listen to and purchase music right from your site.
Several enhancements were released on May 14th to Amazon’s Packing Slip functionality (necessary tweaks such as removing the seller’s email address).
Amazon Web Services [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Need more evidence why Amazon continues to see phenomenal growth (and needs to be a top channel for any online retailer)? Today’s New York Times has a great article on a Christmas saved by Amazon. The author ordered and had delivered to his door step a PlayStation 3, but it was stolen. He calls Amazon, [...]

Amazon announced this morning that it has invested in payment super star Bill Me Later (formerly known as I4Commerce), in my opinion the leading and easiest-to-use credit payment method. The aim is to offer Amazon buyers in the US Bill Me Later as an option so that they can get 90+ days financing for qualifying [...]

Amazon has scheduled a big announcement tomorrow, Monday, November 19, in New York City to announce its new eBook reader Kindle. While there have been few details, Newsweek managed to get the story. Highlights include:

$399
10.3 ounces device
dimensions of a paperback
up to 200 books on the device (more on memory card)
30 hours on a single charge
Almost [...]

Continuing the global roll out of Amazon Prime in all its markets, Amazon today launches Prime in Germany for 29 Euro (about $42 and rising with the US Dollar continuing its free fall). Announced in the German weekly news magazine Der Spiegel, Jeff Bezos admitted that in the short term Prime will be a loss [...]

Randy Smythe, former CEO of eBay DVD PowerSeller Glacier Bay DVD, is musing at Seeking Alpha about the increasing impact third-party sellers (”3P”) have on Amazon and most recently the 41% Q3′07 results. He lists five primary factors:

Okay, rounded down it comes to about 41% revenue growth YOY to $3.26 billion but it’s still a stunning number and something the eBay management team should be very jealous of (considering a lot of eBay sellers expanding to Amazon are fueling this 41% jump). There is some concern about operating margins (causing somewhat of [...]