Search results for Amazon
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Posted
Jun 15 2009, 04:05 AM
by
Douglas McIntyre
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
The U.S. Postal Service, which has been dying for years due to the advent of the fax, e-mail, and overnight delivery, may finally be close to its last act.
The agency lost nearly $2 billion in its last fiscal year and is faced with the serious consideration of cuts of up to 3,100 offices, potentially eliminating thousand of jobs. Media reports say that first class mail volumes are plunging.
What is killing and will probably eventually finish off the Post Office? In a word: “broadband,” the high-speed Internet system that the current Administration plans to build out in the next two years.
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Posted
Jan 03 2008, 03:21 AM
by
Kim Peterson
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
There's been some talk lately about whether eBay CEO Meg Whitman should resign. EBay would be invigorated if she did. Recently, she's been criticized for signing on as the financial co-chair of Mitt Romney's presidential campaign. Whitman met Romney years ago when she consulted for his private equity firm. At BloggingStocks, Gary Sattler thinks that Whitman might request a paid leave of absence from eBay to work on the Romney campaign. I really doubt that. It's ludicrous to think that a CEO of a major public company would do such a thing. If Whitman indeed asks for time off to campaign, eBay shareholders have every right to be angry. Putting politics aside, is it time for Whitman to step down? If you're an eBay shareholder, you might think so. The stock was abysmal in 2006 and continued to disappointment in 2007, staying mostly in the $30-$35 range when companies like Amazon saw shares go through the roof. (Ebay closed yesterday at $32.49.)
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Posted
Dec 13 2007, 10:14 AM
by
Kim Peterson
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
 It's about time eBay cleared the trash from its site.
The online auctioneer plans to improve the "user experience" next year. At the top of the list: getting rid of sellers with "unethical or questionable business practices," including the ones that charge huge shipping fees.
EBay should have been more aggressive in this area long ago. I've heard lots of stories about buyers who pay big shipping fees, only to see on the delivered package that the actual postage was less than $10. Buyers have to be really savvy to figure out the minefield of shipping ripoffs on the site, and that's not a good user experience.
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Posted
Nov 03 2008, 01:25 PM
by
Kim Peterson
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
 I should have known a movement was afoot when my mother called me raving about a bookreader she had just seen on Oprah. How many other mothers had that same conversation that day, and will receive Amazon's Kindle reader in a brightly-wrapped package next month? (Don't worry, my mom doesn't read this blog.)
"I'm telling you," Oprah said on her Oct. 24 show, "it's absolutely my new favorite thing in the world."
Advertising Age looks at the Oprah effect, and predicts brisk Kindle sales this holiday. Amazon's Web traffic jumped 6% that day compared with the Friday before. The number of Google searches that included the word "kindle" grew 479% on Oprah day and went up even more the next day.
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Posted
Feb 25 2008, 12:24 PM
by
Kim Peterson
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
The weeklong boycott of the eBay auction site ends today. But did it accomplish anything? Fed up with recent fee hikes and other policy changes, some eBay sellers decided to boycott the site from Feb. 18 through today. Third-party tracking sites say auction listings have dropped about 13% since the strike started to 13 million items listed. Ebay shares dipped slightly over the past week, but have returned to where they started -- at just under $28. The share price closed up 30 cents to $28.01 today on news that Shopping.com CEO Josh Silverman will now run eBay's Skype online telephony unit.
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Posted
Jul 31 2009, 12:36 PM
by
Minyanville
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
This article was written by Minyanville's Scott Reeves
A Michigan teen has a novel excuse for not getting his homework in on time: Amazon's (AMZN) Kindle ate his book report. Justin Gawronski, 17, is a contemporary kid, so he got an attorney to press his claim against Amazon in federal court. Mixing high-tech and lawyers suggests the old ways are best: Pen, paper, and the family dog have served generations of slackers admirably. Gawronski, an advanced-placement student, said his notes lost all relevance when Amazon deleted electronic copies of George Orwell’s "Nineteen Eighty-Four" from his Kindle during a copyright dispute. Gawronski says he used the electronic book reader’s note function to make comments and annotations as he read the book, when -- zap! -- the text of the novel disappeared, thanks to the Thought Police at Amazon. This left him with comments referring only to empty disc space.
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Posted
May 18 2009, 03:30 AM
by
Douglas McIntyre
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
It is the classic face-off between the king of bricks-and-mortar and the ruler of the e-commerce world. Wal-Mart (WMT) is about to up its bet on consumer electronics, a highly profitable and growing part of Amazon’s (AMZN) business.
At stake is whether physical stores can take back business from e-commerce sites which have been besting them at sales growth rates for nearly a decade.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Wal-Mart is "revamping the electronics departments in its more than 3,500 U.S. stores this week, ramping up an aggressive battle with Best Buy Co. (BBY) and Amazon.com."
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Posted
Oct 29 2007, 09:45 PM
by
Kim Peterson
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
Blue Nile's stock should be on a roll, heading into the holidays with lots of momentum. Instead, the shine is gone. Still, the online jeweler got a nice smooch from Forbes last week. According to the magazine, Blue Nile is selling more engagement rings and wedding bands than Tiffany & Co. -- $197 million in bling last year compared with Tiffany's $186 million. Says Forbes:
"The retail experience just serves to sucker and intimidate the customer, especially men who often feel as out of their depth in a jewelry store as they do inside Victoria's Secret--no wonder three quarters of Blue Nile's Internet ice-buyers are guys."
Oh come on, do men really feel that awkward in a jewelry store? Anyway, that's beside the point. I want to know what's going on with this company's stock. After crossing the $100 mark three weeks ago, the share price has dropped 20% to $80. Are investors feeling jittery before Blue Nile's Nov. 6 earnings release?
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Posted
Dec 16 2007, 02:30 PM
by
Douglas McIntyre
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
It is hard to find stocks that could double in a fairly short period of time. It rarely happens with shares in really big companies. There are exceptions like Apple and Amazon. But, most stocks that make big moves are smaller, and, they are often shares that have had a big fall.
For a stock to double over a few quarters it needs a catalyst of amazing earnings, a big customer win, a break-up or a buy-out. At 24/7 Wall St. we went through hundreds of companies to find ones with shares that could double. Each firm had to be matched with one or more compelling reasons to create a significant spike.
We came up with the list, and if you want to get greater detail on the analysis you can see it here.
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Posted
Mar 07 2008, 06:08 AM
by
Kim Peterson
Rating:
Money Blog: Top Stocks Blog - MSN Money
Selling wine online in this country is pretty screwed up. Or, as the Financial Times so elegantly stated, it's "a business fraught with regulatory complexities and littered with the wreckage of previous failures."
But Amazon is up for the task, and is recruiting a senior wine buyer on its site. I'd like to volunteer, but my knowledge of wine basically comes from what I learned in "Sideways." Amazon has been interested in this area for some time, having spent $30 million nine years ago for a 45% stake of Wineshopper.com. Oops, Wineshopper was folded into Wine.com the next year.
Maybe Amazon can help straighten out the convoluted mess that is selling wine online. Retailers can only ship wine to 26 states. Wineries and retailers follow different rules. FreetheGrapes.org has a nice summary of this complex issue. And the competition is nasty. Online wine retailer Wine.com went so far as to conduct its own sting operation, telling state regulators whenever it found that its rivals were violating wine-shipping laws.
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