Home / Markets / Industries / Retail
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Amazon’s Online 'Window' of Opportunity
Erik Berte
FOXBusiness
Amazon.com (AMZN) is using its 3D Windowshop platform to power the online store’s 2008 holiday toy list, allowing customers to view products in a new interactive way.
"We're constantly innovating with our customers, so with Windowshop we aimed to create an immersive shopping experience was really fun and fluid and lets people really experience products,” said Amazon’s customer experience VP, Eva Manolis, in an interview with FOX Business Network.
Check out the interview in the video below.
The holiday toy list section of Amazon’s Web site is composed of “windows” that have images, videos, audio, as well as written content for each product. You can navigate through the 3D-animated store using your keyboard and browse or, rather, “Windowshop” by price, age range, or product type.
Windowshop was launched in September as a separate experimental Web site, said Manolis, and once the company saw how the platform was received by customers, it decided to bring it back to Amazon.com to be used for this toy shopping experience.
Windowshop.com continues to be a place where Amazon puts its best-seller lists and editorial picks each week, and new music, video games, and movies are added every Tuesday, said Manolis.
The site has trailers for best-selling movies, samples of tracks from the latest CDs, and even audio reviews of new books. Then, if you decide you’d like to buy something, you can simply click a link that brings you directly to the product’s page on Amazon.com.
But in an environment that will be tough for retail holiday sales, how will a site like this, or any online retail site for that matter, fare?
Thomas Harpointer, CEO of AIS Media, a Web site development firm, said in a FOX Business interview that competition is fierce, but retailers that have an effective Web presence have an outlook that’s not quite as bleak as traditional brick and mortar stores.
Using the Web can also help those traditional stores, however, by bringing in customers. “For every dollar (customers are) spending online, the Internet is affecting about three dollars offline,” Harpoitner added.
FOX Translator
No data currently available.
No data currently available.
A specialist is a member of a stock exchange who works as an auctioneer for a specific stock and/or stocks. It can be an individual, partnership, corporation or group of firms.
The specialist works to maintain a "fair and orderly market" for respective stocks, matching up buyers and sellers by displaying the best "bid" and "ask" prices at its trading post. If buys are not equal to sells, the specialist evens the scale by buying or selling shares, accordingly. However, they cannot make their own transactions until all investor orders have been placed.
Gauging supply and demand, the specialist sets an opening price for the stocks in its domain. If a price has not been set by the time the market opens, the specialist can delay that particular stock's opening.
Specialists make money off the "spread," which is the difference between bid and ask prices on orders.
