Quotes About E-commerce

We're probably one of the few Internet dot-com B2Bs business-to-business companies that have improved their bottom line.

Oh, I think there are a lot of people who would be buying and selling online today that go up there and they get the information, but then when it comes time to type in their credit card they think twice because they're not sure about how that might get out and what that might mean for them.

When we started the e-commerce, nobody believed that China would have e-commerce because people believed in 'guang-shi,' face-to-face, and all kinds of network in traditional ways. There's no trust system in China.

EBay gave me the framework to discover I was an e-commerce entrepreneur. I touched everything, from shipping to logistics.

I believe that Amazon is going to destroy the box stores... and when box stores go under, restaurants go under, the movie theaters go under, the gas stations go under. You become ghost towns.

The construction toy category is one category that has a lot of room to grow online.

Anything commodity-like will be sold online. The world is going to trade commodities like it trades stocks.

I love black dresses. I think everyone should own a lot, but black dresses don't sell online because on the computer they don't read like anything.

A comparison of eToys with Toys "R" Us, Inc.—its biggest rival—is shocking. In the preceding three months, Toys "R" Us had earned $27 million in net income and had sold over 70 times more goods than eToys had sold in an entire year. And yet as Figure 17-3 shows, the stock market valued eToys at nearly $2 billion more than Toys "R" Us.

Especially when it comes to social and shopping, women rule the Internet.

Well, another market is being created now out of Internet technology.

In a world where consumers had limited choice, you needed to compete for locations," says Ross, who went on to cofound eCommera, a British e-commerce advisory firm. "But in a world where consumers have unlimited choice, you need to compete for attention. And this requires something more than selling other people's products.

Friends suggested that it sounded a bit sinister. But something about it must have captivated Bezos: he registered the URL in September 1994, and he kept it. Type Relentless.com into the Web today and it takes you to Amazon.

Bezos ultimately concluded that if Amazon was to continue to thrive as a bookseller in a new digital age, it must own the e-book business in the same way that Apple controlled the music business. "It is far better to cannibalize yourself than have someone else do it," said Diego Piacentini

Prime would eventually justify its existence. The service turned customers into Amazon addicts who gorged on the almost instant gratification of having purchases reliably appear two days after they ordered them. Signing up for Amazon Prime, Jason Kilar said at the time, "was like going from a dial-up to a broadband Internet connection.

These are not fever dreams. They are near inevitabilities. It's an easy prediction to make—that Jeff Bezos will do what he has always done. He will attempt to move faster, work his employees harder, make bolder bets, and pursue both big inventions and small ones, all to achieve his grand vision for Amazon—that it be not just an everything store, but ultimately an everything company.

Great merchants have never had the opportunity to understand their customers in a truly individualized way," he said. "E-commerce is going to make that possible."13

Type Relentless.com into the Web today and it takes you to Amazon.

maximizing the Internet's ability to provide a superior selection of products as compared to those available at traditional retail stores.

There was little science to Amazon's earliest distribution methods. The company held no inventory itself at first. When a customer bought a book, Amazon ordered it, the book would arrive within a few days, and Amazon would store it in the basement and then ship it off to the customer. It took Amazon a week to deliver most items to customers, and it could take several weeks or more than a month for scarcer titles.

The confluence of those three initiatives—in the fulfillment centers, and with AWS and the Kindle—vaulted Amazon back into the graces of Wall Street. In 2008, Amazon surpassed eBay in market capitalization and was beginning to be mentioned in the same breath as Google, Apple, and a new Silicon Valley upstart, Facebook.

Unlike brick-and-mortar retailers, whose inventories were spread out across hundreds or thousands of stores around the country, Amazon had one website and, at that time, a single warehouse and inventory. Amazon's ratio of fixed costs to revenue was considerably more favorable than that of its offline competitors

It's an easy prediction to make—that Jeff Bezos will do what he has always done. He will attempt to move faster, work his employees harder, make bolder bets, and pursue both big inventions and small ones, all to achieve his grand vision for Amazon—that it be not just an everything store, but ultimately an everything company.

Amazon customers who joined Prime doubled, on average, their spending on the site, according to a person familiar with the company's internal finances at the time. A Prime member was like a shopper who walked into a Costco warehouse for a case of beer and walked out with the beer plus an armful of DVDs, a nine-pound smoked ham, and a flat-screen television.