Posted on 12/09/2011 10:29:04 AM PST by Razzz42
Yeah, sellers I have talked to using Amazon’s Market Place complain about how long it takes to get their money from their sales.
No doubt Amazon will try to manipulate to gain an advantage but for buyers it’s ‘buyer beware’ with sellers it’s ‘Ebay’ with their ever increasing cost to sell including Ebay owned PayPal or Craigslist or classified ad or other forms of selling like consignment.
Always amazed that 70% of employment is reportedly from small businesses. I don’t know how they compete but they do.
Some times, yes.
But that is because a store like B&N is in the mall, and I look there while my wife shops. Borders used to beat their price and selection by far.
>>How do you suggest they compete on total net price including Sales Tax?
I’m not proposing that they compete, and wouldn’t presume to tell them how. I’m proposing that they DIE, if they can’t compete.
>>How do you propose they communicate book prices that are not the printed prices on the titles?
Stickers? Percent off policy? Roulette wheel at the cash register?
Frankly, if books are your main concern, they’re becoming rapidly obsolete, and you might not bother making such an effort to maintain the obsolete infrastructure that grew up around distributing them.
(Hold on... Gotta go. The whale oil wagon is here with our month’s supply we need to keep our house lit.)
“Frankly, if books are your main concern, they’re becoming rapidly obsolete, and you might not bother making such an effort to maintain the obsolete infrastructure that grew up around distributing them.”
Yeah I took it personally when I was unable to keep Borders afloat.
(Off to have my whale sashimi now)
Retailers seem to charge ‘made in USA’ prices when most stuff comes from overseas manufactured with slave labor. US pricing for junk goods seems to be adjusting to actual costs.
Major items esp. military spec items suffer from quality control issues that come from mostly overseas manufactures as it is hard to constantly verify quality standards to specs. Of course, there is Germany’s high quality machine items but you are going to be paying for that in higher prices.
(B&H is one well-oiled online retail organization, by the way, although I would advise them to cut costs by not sending me any more of those humongous paper catalogs that go straight into the trash.)
In the 1st place Amazon made billions selling books, ok fine. Now they are pushing Kindle, which to any bibliophile is anethema. To me its an existential form of betrayal.
There is a line in the movie "How green was my valley" where the narrator says "nothing good ever lasts". We have sacrificed so much that is good and solid for the sake of convenience that nothing is worth much anymore. And so ultimately it will be w/ books.
Look at music and what ease of copying and propogation has done for that industry. Its nothing but shlock.
Look at the ways we communicate, texting and so forth. Has this been a positive trend for language? The written word?
Look at Walmart and what its done to communities. Now of course its the old model destined for the trash heap.
In the end I guess I'm just a romantic, watching the world shed its skin for something new and I'm saddened by the loss of those things I loved. Every man's fate once he passes a certain age.
But I don't have to like it, nor will I sing praises to the harbingers of a new, marked down, no muss, no fuss reality. A reality whose sell by date creeps closer and closer to today.
and btw, Mcdonald's is the perfect analogy; it too is crap.
I LOVE my kindle and buy books with it all the time from Amazon.
The local Walden book store closed up where I live and the next book store is hours away in Anchorage, even the local Safeway supermarket stopped selling almost all the magazines and books as well, the other three big box stores carry very little as well.
So I bought the Kindle touch last saturday and I have Matthew Brackens books, Clive Cussler, Lee Child and a lot of Edger Rice Burroughs John Carter of Mars books, some which were free.
I doubt I will ever buy another dead tree book unless its something extremely of a specialty that I cannot use on my Kindle.
Being a seasonal worker in Alaska and not going back to work until spring the Kindle and Amazon are a godsend, saving me money in fuel costs, giving me access to books that won’t be on display in a liberal guided bookstore and access to classics that most places won’t have because they are just that, a classic with no large profit margin.
Just on issue is that any new book released will cost just as much as the real thing, best to find someone willing to share or just wait a couple of weeks, Amazon cannot set the prices on the big elite publishing houses.
Amazon claims book prices are set by the publisher. I refuse to pay full price and wait till it’s marked down at least once. I have a year’s worth of books on it and am sending it to my son and getting a new model. Cannot wait and neither can he.
You're probably right about that. Although, I wonder if they have a totally reliable way of determining whether or not a given order came via the catalog. E.g., maybe the customer found it in the catalog, then ordered online to save time and postage. If so, then the catalog still has value. But I would bet more and more of their business is from internet searches and customers browsing the B&H site (where they can present a lot more info about each product than they can in their catalog).
My purchase was driven by Amazon and Google entirely. I never saw their catalog until I got on their list as a result of my purchase.
Remember Computer Shopper? I used to have a subscription at work. I would keep the issues in a bookcase. Back in the mid nineties, each perfect-bound issue was the size of a major city telephone book and consisted of perhaps a 100 pages of editorial content on decent paper spread out in a sea of advertising on cheaper paper (the kind that gets ink on your fingers). Then, as the internet ramped up, they got slimmer and slimmer. Looking at my bookcase, it was easy to see the trend. I see from their Wikipedia entry that they finally ceased print in 2009. I lost track of them in about 2002.
” Shoes, sometimes. “
“Remember Computer Shopper? I used to have a subscription at work. I would keep the issues in a bookcase. Back in the mid nineties, each perfect-bound issue was the size of a major city telephone book and consisted of perhaps a 100 pages of editorial content on decent paper spread out in a sea of advertising on cheaper paper (the kind that gets ink on your fingers). Then, as the internet ramped up, they got slimmer and slimmer. Looking at my bookcase, it was easy to see the trend. I see from their Wikipedia entry that they finally ceased print in 2009. I lost track of them in about 2002. “
It its heyday, it was the single biggest thing in the magazine rack I have ever seen. For components, it was pretty much a must-have, even though some of the dealers in it were shady or outright dishonest.
As you note, computer shopper may be THE example of what the internet did to traditional catalog/snailmail/phone business.
Oops!
There’s a bunch of apps for barcode reading. Which one would you say works best?
This past week I've had the very unfortunate experience of trying to find and buy a child safety device for lever handled doors.
The first type was available in most stores and I promptly went out and bought it, only to get it home and ...it does not fit. The handle design does not allow the big, clunky, bulky base to fit over the lever J design. Awesome ...I can return that to the store locally.
The second type needed to be ordered and is not available except of online. The photos are grossly insufficient and product dimension description does not show where or how measurements were taken. So I am stuck ordering something that I don't know will fit. Add onto that the shipping cost and wait for a safety device. And if it doesn't work...the hassle of returning and paying shipping again.
So yes! I need to handle and touch the dam* item. Every vendor of the item I checked failed to provide the information I needed to determine if it is worth the hassle or not.
Don't know. Haven't used any of them. But try http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000749751. There's still time to run out and buy something today and get your 5% off.
What's interesting about this app is not that it reads barcodes through the camera. It's what it does with the barcodes after they're read. One could also say, What's interesting is not that it takes a picture, but what it does with the picture afterwards.
It's a matter of your point of view in the overall process. This app simply combines existing cool technological capabilities in a particularly useful form.
Here's a developer's blog entry from 3.5 years ago. He includes details on how his prototype worked.
Thanks.
Ping, per our discussion.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.