Scott Porad

Just a few random thoughts on Amazon.com…they’ve been on my mind a lot lately…

• Amazon Prime has changed my life.  When buying holiday gifts last winter it was cheaper to to get Prime than to pay for all the shipping.  Since then, I’ve probably ordered 100x what I would have otherwise.
• Amazon Prime Local Delivery is redonkulous!  I’ve used it twice recently to order computer accessories.  I ordered each item around 11am.  Once I got the item at 1pm, the other around 4pm.  That’s about 1 million times easier than shlepping out to some store to get them.
• Did you hear what Eric Schmidt said about the “gang of four” in consumer technology—Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon?  Struck me as strange that Amazon was in that group.  I mean, I suppose there’s AWS, which I’m sure is a big “platform” business, but I thought they were a merchant…??  Hold that thought for a second…
• See the Kindle plus Kindle Direct Publishing.
• See Amazon Instant Video plus Amazon Studios.
• A-ha!  Own the content and the distribution.  Or, rather, distribute products that you own for better margins.  Very clever.  They’re taking it slow in this area, but they have time to be the tortoise.
• What does the market think:
  • AMZN: 50x forward-looking earnings
  • AAPL: 11x
  • GOOG: 14x
  • Facebook: N/A

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I regularly receive questions from readers about my experience working on the web, at Cheezburger, and so forth. I enjoy it when people reach out to me, which is why I make all of my contact information—including my phone number—available on my contact page. If you have a question for me, on- or off-topic, please don’t hesitate to send me a note.

Recently, someone who runs a medium-sized e-commerce site wrote in:

We’ve been having a debate around what our “average conversion rate” should be.  Currently, it’s 1%, but this article says we should expect 2% or higher. Does this mesh with what you saw at drugstore.com and other online retailers?  If yes, where are we going wrong?

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I’m have a friend with a web site who sells laptop cases online (which he designs and has manufactured in China). In the month of January, year-over-year his sales are down quite a bit, so he asked me to help him figure out why.

First, I checked to see if visits were up or down. He has an increase in visitors, and his search engine traffic is way up, so that’s not the problem.

Next, I looked at conversion. Way down. I mean double-digit down. This explains the difference in revenue.

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