I found this email in my mailbox today and thought I’d share it, as Amazon’s latest move is an interesting one to note in relation to the Kaplak project.
Amazon.com has been around since the very beginnings of the web, pioneering online mail order business, with all that this entails. Amazon also owns Alexa, which indexes and provides information on global website traffic, ranking the most visited websites in the world. As early as 1996, the company launched their own affiliate marketing program on the web, where participants earn as much as 10% for providing links to Amazon products on their website. Late last year Amazon launched their own online music store (for now available in the US only), and now comes WebStore. To quote the email in plain text:
WebStore by Amazon gives you a branded e-commerce site backed by the support, selection and expertise of Amazon. You can be confident that your WebStore is going to be up when your customers come clicking. Better yet, WebStore is easy to set up and comes with a number of great marketing features so you can start selling in minutes!
It has been comparatively easy to set up and run one’s own online business for some time, with several strong open source solutions around, osCommerce being a prime contender. What’s new in Amazons Webstore is making it a lot easier, and additionally giving users the opportunity to use Amazons payments and recommendations systems. Great move! I can’t believe they didn’t do it sooner. Amazon’s price tag is not so great however, even though it may include reducing parts of the “hazzle” of running your own webshop. It excludes everyone who has not already established a business model, i.e. effectively most on the slimmer end of the ‘long tail’, which means that Amazon loses out on a lot of long tail business. Still, it’s a great move, which no doubt will be embraced by lots of medium-sized to smaller niche-oriented businesses.
Read more here. And here’s an example of a webshop using Amazon WebStore.
