Word: amazon
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...thing, you can now set up your own little e-commerce homestead on a corner of Amazon real estate called zShops. But much more important, Amazon's main search tool--that little text box in the upper-left-hand corner of the home page--has started pointing customers toward sites other than its own. "Think of a small-town merchant who suggests you might try someone else down the street," says Bezos, with his trademark earsplitting laugh...
...just awakened to: you can't stick around on the profit margins of a bookstore, or even a book-CD-video-toys-electronic store with the odd auction thrown in (which last year had sales of $1 billion and zero earnings as usual). To stay ahead of the curve, Amazon needs to build the ultimate e-commerce portal: the holy grail; the must-have home page for all online shoppers. And for that you need a shopping agent...
...just over a year ago, Amazon shelled out $180 million for a price-comparison site called junglee.com They tinkered around with its virtual database technology until relaunching it last week as the more prosaically named All Product Search. Wall Street was buying, sending Amazon's stock...
...trouble with bots that get sold to big corporations, not surprisingly, is that they tend to get a little compromised. In junglee's case, the ability to compare prices at other book sites seems to have disappeared. Type in Tom Clancy in Amazon's All Product Search, and there's no danger of your buying Rainbow Six from Barnes and Noble or Borders...
...your broker to the corner grocer to the guy who sold you that recliner you're sitting on is paying attention to the online biz, no matter what the aggravation. And whether they're working for an aggressive Net start-up, a brick-and-mortar retailer who fears getting "Amazon-ed" or a company content for now to dip a toe into the scary world of e-commerce, they're all interested in the future of your wallet. Says Dan Burke, senior analyst at Gomez Advisors, a rater of e-commerce sites: "We're just getting to the really interesting...