Welcome to this week’s edition of eFocus, RepricerExpress’ weekly look at the top ecommerce stories and latest Amazon news from around the Web.
Amazon is shutting down this online service: Victor Luckerson at Fortune reports that Amazon is closing its hotel-booking service, Amazon Destinations. Bloomberg reports that the travel site had only been in operation for six months and was an attempt to grab a piece of the $960 billion tourism market, currently dominated by sites like Expedia, Priceline and Airbnb. Amazon’s service included maps, deals on hotels and user reviews of restaurants in the area but as of 13 October, Amazon has switched on the no vacancy sign. Continue reading…
Amazon launches handicraft store: BBC News reports that Amazon is entering the handicraft market with the launch of a new online store for handmade goods. Handmade at Amazon is currently available by invitation-only to an initial 5,000 sellers on the site. Its competitor, artisan website Etsy, was valued at $1.8bn (£1.2bn) when it launched on the stock market in April. Continue reading…
Forget the everything store—Amazon’s an everything business: Davey Alba at Wired reports that journalist Brad Stone once dubbed Amazon the “everything store”. Today, Amazon isn’t about selling everything, it’s an everything business. At last week’s Amazon Web Services annual conference, the company introduced a range of cloud computing business services that layer on top of its cloud computing infrastructure.
Last Christmas 2015 Royal Mail posting dates: Chris Dawson at Tamebay reports that Royal Mail has announced the last recommended posting dates for Christmas 2015. Whilst your courier might have later collection times, it’s likely that you’ll want to get all of your outgoing shipments out by the Wednesday the 23rd as Christmas Day falls on a Friday this year. Continue reading…
Here’s where Amazon and Google could make their next $100bn: Cade Metz at Wired reports that Forrester has put together a report predicting the future of the cloud computing business, which it says belongs to Amazon and Google. That was before the news that Dell is buying EMC for about $67 billion, but analyst John Rhymer says the deal doesn’t really change anything as neither is a major player in the wider market for “public cloud services,” which is where the future lies.
