'Net Features : amazon

SMBs Passing on gTLDs

Amberly Dressler — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 21:00:00 GMT

New generic top-level domains (gTLDs) are only going to make the Internet more confusing to navigate.

That is according to 52.3 percent of the 600 respondents who were queried via SurveyMonkey as part of the Sedo sponsored gTLD Awareness Report. The goal of the research was to uncover whether small to mid-size businesses (SMBs) are aware of the pending launch of new gTLDs in 2013 and whether they plan to take advantage of them. Sixty-three percent of those surveyed are unaware that new gTLDs will be available in 2013 and many do not understand what the value of these new addresses will be. Nearly half either saw no advantage or were unsure what the advantage of a new gTLD would be.

The findings tend to be particularly useful, because 63.7 percent of the respondents have purchased domain names in the past, and the survey audience understands the importance of the correct domain name to their business’ success. Even so, a resounding 94.1 percent said they were not currently planning to purchase a new gTLD, and there were very mixed results when it came to what would persuade them to purchase one (see image).

So what exactly are new gTLDs? They are brand-new domain extensions that will increase domain name choices to include descriptive strings, such as .blog, .book, .hotel, which can help in brand awareness and general memorability. Major brands, like Amazon, are feverishly applying for new gTLDs with plans to use them, but this research by Sedo makes it clear that a successful rollout of new gTLDs will be dependent on a strong education campaign that highlights why they are valuable to SMBs.

Read Sedo’s full gTLD Awareness Report, here.

State of Cloud Storage – Azure Ousts Amazon S3

Pete Prestipino — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 18:15:00 GMT

So who’s the best cloud storage provider – Azure, Amazon, Google, HP, Rackspace?

Enterprise storage provider Nasuni released results from its latest State of Cloud Storage Report and found that Microsoft Windows Azure (Blob) Storage outperformed last year’s leader, Amazon S3. Surprised?

Nasuni tested the speed (write/read/delete), availability and scalability of the top five public cloud storage providers and found that Microsoft Azure surpassed Amazon in every single category that was examined.

Azure was 56 percent faster in write speed than Amazon, and 39 percent faster at reading files than HP in read speed. The average response time for Azure was 25 percent faster than Amazon S3. With Amazon cloud troubles over the past year, Web developers might ultimately find they’re using more Azure and less S3 in the future.

"Microsoft's investment in its second generation cloud storage, which it made available to customers last year, has clearly paid off," said Andres Rodriguez, CEO of Nasuni. "With Amazon S3 and Microsoft Windows Azure, the cloud storage industry clearly has two strong players to choose from. Even more encouraging, however, was the marked performance improvement across the board. As CSPs continue to mature, competition among top quality providers can only benefit enterprise IT."

High Storage Instances Come to Amazon EC2

Michael Garrity — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 21:09:00 GMT

Amazon Web Services (AWS) wanted to give its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) users a present, and what better way to celebrate the holidays than with family – a new instance family, that is.

The cloud computing services provider from Amazon recently announced High Storage instances for EC2. This additional instance family is optimized for applications that required rapid access to large amounts of data, while also providing AWS customers with 35 EC2 Compute Units of computing capacity, 117 GiB of RAM and 48 TB of storage across 24 hard disk drives. Moreover, these instances are capable of delivering more than 2.4 GB of sequential I/O performance per second.

In other words, because High Storage instances provide such massive amounts of direct attached storage per instance, they are ideal for data-intensive applications like Hadoop workloads, log processing, data warehousing and parallel file systems for processing and analyzing large datasets in the AWS cloud.

High Storage instances follow eight other EC2 instance families, including Cluster Compute and High I/O instances, to help meet the evolving application requirements of Amazon EC2 customers. Like the others, High Storage instances were designed to enhance the performance and efficiency of even the most demanding applications. They also power the new petabyte-scale data warehousing service Amazon Redshift and can help Amazon Elastic MapReduce customers process larger quantities of data more resourcefully, who helps significantly lower costs.

AWS customers can immediately launch High Storage instances through the AWS Management Console, Amazon EC2 and Elastic MapReduce Command Line Interfaces, AWS SDKs and various other third-party libraries. However, at the moment this new instance family is only available in the US East Region; they will be made available in other AWS Regions “in the coming months.”

Amazon Remains King of E-Commerce

Allison Howen — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 18:25:00 GMT

Consumers once again crowned Amazon the king of e-commerce, according to a recent holiday survey from analytics firm ForeSee.

In fact, ForeSee’s eighth annual Holiday E-Retail Satisfaction Index, which is based on more than 24,000 customer surveys collected from 100 top retailers during the 2012 holiday shopping season, reveals that Amazon remains the top online retailer for the eighth year in a row, with a customer satisfaction score of 88. Amazon’s high score can partially be attributed to the retailer’s variety of merchandise available on the site.

“At this point, Amazon has been dominant for so long and has such a history of focusing on the customer, its hard to imagine anyone else coming close,” said Larry Freed, ForeSee president and CEO. “Companies should emulate Amazon’s focus on the customer, which is clearly linked to superior revenues over the years.”

One of the study’s most surprising statistics shows that Apple’s online retail store received its lowest customer satisfaction rating in four years, with a score of 80. However, Apple’s rating is still better than the Index’s average customer satisfaction score of 78, which some top retailers, such as Dell, failed to reach. In fact, Dell.com’s rating fell four percent from last year and the company received a customer satisfaction score of 77. Furthermore, JCPenney.com’s rating declined 6 percent to a score of 78, which was the biggest year-over-year decline of all companies.

“This year, we’re seeing that even some of the largest companies in the country are at risk if they lose sight of customer satisfaction,” said Freed. “Satisfaction with the customer experience, when measured correctly, is the most important predictor of future success, and while Amazon clearly gets it, Apple stumbles from their usual focus on the customer experience. Dell and J.C. Penney seem to be struggling to find their way, which could make them extremely vulnerable to competitors.”

ForeSee’s report indicates that online retailers should focus on improving merchandise factors, such as appeal, variety and availability of products, in the next year in order to increase customer satisfaction scores. This is because 67 percent of satisfied customers are more likely to return to a company the next time they need to purchase a similar product. Moreover, satisfied consumers are more likely to recommend sites to their friends and stay loyal to brands.

Quick Hit: The Future of Gifting with Amazon & Facebook

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 17:37:00 GMT

Amazon and Facebook have joined forces to offer a new feature in Friends & Family Gifting.

Amazon has offered the ability for users to create and share item wish lists for quite some time, but if the wish list creators’ information (their Amazon info) was unknown, it was nearly impossible to find and created a rather significant purchase barrier. That obviously wasn't ideal, but by partnering with Facebook, Amazon has made the process much, much simpler. And you can bet on Amazon users connecting these two powerhouse services.

The service enables Amazon users to track birthdays and special occasions, receive personalized gift ideas and be notified of important developments through shopping email reminders. The news followed (by one day) the launch of Facebook's own Gifts service which also syncs with a friends list and will issue reminders and gift ideas - as well as manage delivery.

Amazon Gives Businesses a Page Up on the Competition

Amberly Dressler — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 20:00:00 GMT

Brands or agencies looking for an inexpensive and social-media savvy way to deliver its message and sell products worldwide – without having to build an entire solution or license, install and operate third-party software – may not have to look further than Amazon.

The company recently unveiled Amazon Pages, which is a self-serve, brand-specific Web page at Amazon.com that functions as a custom landing page where businesses can drive traffic to. Additionally, companies can leverage these pages to appear on either its Amazon page, Facebook page or both.

The upside for businesses, concerning sales and ROI, could be huge. A business’s products and brand message is exposed to millions of Amazon viewers and buyers, at no cost to a business.

“As potential customers view your Amazon Page and read your posts, Amazon Analytics gathers a wide variety of metrics using proven Amazon ecommerce software,” Amazon wrote. “By evaluating this data, you can create posts and display product offerings strategically to engage the customers you most want, increasing the likelihood of views and purchases. To help you further improve your understanding of your customers, you can track and compare considerations and sales by segment.”

Of the metrics tracked are click-through rate, purchasing index and more. For a step-by-step guide to Amazon Pages, click here.

Amazon Web Services Down Under

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 18:15:00 GMT

Amazon Web Services has announced the launch of a new Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region, the ninth in its global cloud computing platform.

“Over 10,000 customers in Australia and New Zealand are already using AWS, and this is before opening our new AWS Region in Australia today,” said Andy Jassy, Senior Vice President, Amazon Web Services. “With the ability to achieve single-digit millisecond latency to end users in Sydney, store data locally in Australia, and get to market more quickly and inexpensively by using AWS’s unmatched infrastructure technology platform, we expect the launch of AWS’s Sydney Region to further increase the amount of Australian and New Zealand customers leveraging AWS.”

At launch, the Sydney region consists of two seperate Availability Zones (datacenters in seperate distinct locations within a region which are designed to be operationally independent) and will support numerous AWS services including Elastic Compute Cloud, Map Reduce, DynamoDB, Simple DB and the Amazon Relational Database Service among others.

Among the more than 10,000 customers in Australia and New Zealand that are already using AWS, are the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (for running customer-facing Web apps), BrandScreen (which is using Elastic MapReduce to test machine learning algorithms and process data for its real-time ad trading platform), and Halfbrick Studioes - makers of FruitNinja - which is using DynamoDB and multiple Availability Zones to host millions of regular players.

Is Walmart's Semantic Search an Amazon Killer?

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 21:23:00 GMT

Amazon may be far, far ahead in the race towards all-time e-commerce glory, but Walmart is leveraging some powerful technology to cut into its lead - namely on-site search.

Walmart's Labs project/division unveiled a new search engine for Walmart.com which uses semantic search technology, enabling the retailer to anticipate the intent of a shopper's search and deliver more relevant results. Going by the name Polaris, Walmart.com has already seen an (approximate) 10-15 percent increase in shoppers completing a purchase after searching using the new search facility.

“Search is a crown jewel for any e-commerce company to own,” said Neil Ashe, president and CEO of Walmart Global eCommerce. “Today’s announcement underscores our commitment to owning technology that is fundamental in giving our millions of customers anytime, anywhere access to the products they want at the lowest prices.”

Polaris is based on the Social Genome project, a platform that "connects people to places, events and products giving Walmart a richer level of understanding about customers and products" according to the announcement at Walmart Labs. The new Polaris search engine at Walmart uses advanced algorithms including query understanding and synonym mining to determine user intent when delivering results.

“With Polaris, we are giving users the ability to connect with the items they want but also surface items based on their interests and likely intent,” said Sri Subramaniam, vice president for @WalmartLabs and head of the Polaris initiative. “This is the start of what we imagine search to be as we continue to deliver products to accelerate Walmart’s global e-commerce efforts.”

AWS Comes to CoreSite's New York Datacenter

Michael Garrity — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 09:00:00 GMT

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is going metropolitan. For the first time, AWS Direct Connect will have a presence in New York thanks to a new partnership with datacenter provider CoreSite.

CoreSite provides datacenter products and interconnection services to over 750 customers, including enterprise-level organizations, communications providers, cloud and content companies, financial firms, media and entertainment companies, government agencies and more. And now, the company boasts AWS Direct Connect availability in its New York datacenter.

This move helps CoreSite meet the increasing customer demand for access to the AWS cloud, and will help improve its ability to service digital content communities, financial organizations and managed service providers, as Direct Connect allows customers to directly access cloud services using a secure private network connection. Direct access provides increased scalability for throughput and a more consistent network performance for reduced network costs. It also helps reduce bandwidth costs while increasing capacity.

More than anything, this decision makes it easy for CoreSite customers to establish a dedicated network connection from their location to the AWS cloud without accessing the public cloud over the Internet. This leads to improved application performance and enhanced security – two of the biggest concerns for companies using the cloud.

Customers can access Direct Connect using a standard, single-mode fiber 1 Gbps or 10 Gbps Ethernet cross connection or an Any2 Internet exchange connection, which can be ordered through the MyCoreSite online customer portal.

CoreSite has been offering AWS Direct Connect from its Los Angeles datacenter since late last year.

Amazon Sales Up 29% to $12.83 Billion

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 06:30:00 GMT

Amazon had quite the second quarter based on its most recent financial results. Net sales for the company increased 29% to $12.83 billion in the second quarter, compared with $9.91 billion in second quarter 2011.

Numerous highlights were discussed in the recent earnings call, including:

- Kindle Fire remains the #1 bestselling product across the millions of items available on Amazon.com since launch. Over this same period, the top 10 selling items on Amazon.com were digital products – Kindle, Kindle books, and accessories.

- Worldwide Electronics and Other General Merchandise sales grew 38% to $8.16 billion. Excluding the unfavorable impact from year-over-year changes in foreign exchange rates throughout the quarter, sales grew 42%.

- AWS relaunched AWS Support with the expansion of free support for all AWS customers, a reduction in pricing on premium support plans and adding multiple new features to help customers better interact with and improve their use of AWS, including chat functionality and proactive alerts when opportunities exist to save money, improve system performance, or close security gaps.

Merchants are Optimistic about the Future of E-Commerce

Allison Howen — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 00:30:00 GMT

The confidence levels of e-commerce merchants are running high according to a recent survey that was recently published by multi-channel e-commerce solution provider Vendio.

The 2012 Spring Survey reveals insights about merchant’s outlooks in regards to the future of e-commerce, as well as the satisfaction levels of merchants that sell on eBay and Amazon.

The Future of E-commerce

The study reveals that most merchants are hopeful about the future of online shopping. In fact, 84 percent of respondents claim to be optimistic about their online growth potential, while 16 percent say that brick and mortar stores are the method that they currently use to sell their goods. Additionally, only 11 percent of respondents are considering brick and mortar locations for future sales compared to 33 percent who are considering opening their own web store and 26 percent who are considering selling goods on Amazon.com.

The survey also revealed that many of the respondents have a long-term history of selling goods online. Twenty-six percent of the respondents say that they have been an e-commerce seller for more than 10 years, while 30 percent claim to have been in business for 1-4 years. Further statistics show that 20 percent of merchants are newcomers on the Web – only being in business for less than a year, while 15 percent have been in business for 4-7 years and 9 percent have been using e-commerce platforms for 7-10 years.

“We continue to see amazing growth with e-commerce as more sellers are moving online to grow their revenue stream,” says Mike Effle, Chief Executive Officer of Vendio. “Since our inception in 1999, we have seen consistent growth in entrepreneurs and small businesses looking to the Internet to sell their goods. It’s not surprising that those vendors, based on significant success, see a positive future for e-commerce.”

Selling on eBay and Amazon

The survey findings also reveal that the majority of merchants who sell products on Amazon and/or eBay are satisfied with their overall experience and sales – with 80 percent claiming to be satisfied with the overall experience of Amazon compared to 76 percent who are satisfied with eBay.

However, the survey showed that eBay and Amazon differ slightly when it comes to ease of use, with 93 percent of eBay users rating the process of listing on eBay as either “Very Easy”, “Somewhat Easy” or “Easy”, compared to 80 percent of Amazon users who gave the same ratings.

Further statistics disclose that the fees sellers pay to eBay (and PayPal, its primary payment source) and Amazon appear to be similar, with 42 percent of respondents claiming that less than 15 percent of their sales are taken by eBay/PayPal fees compared to 36 percent who pay less than 15 percent to Amazon. Furthermore, 88 percent of merchants say they pay less than 25 percent of sales to eBay/PayPal compared to 91 percent who pay less than 25 percent to Amazon.com.

“It is good to see that sellers are having positive experiences with both eBay and Amazon,” says Effle. “It is important that sellers feel the two major online marketplaces are an effective use of their time. Thus, Amazon could close the gap between the two by improving the overall ease of use for their merchants.”

What's New With Google Shopping?

Michael Garrity — Mon, 04 Jun 2012 20:15:00 GMT

The Internet was buzzing last week at the beta launch of Google’s latest service, Google Shopping. As always, the most recognizable name on the ‘Net is trying to wedge its way into another industry, but what will this mean for the e-commerce industry?

First of all, it’s important to understand exactly what Google is up to here, in case you haven’t heard. Essentially, Google is re-branding its Google Product Search services with a whole new business model. Soon, only merchants that pay to advertise with Google will be listed in the company’s product search.

In other words, Google has created a secondary retail-focused search engine that exclusively features paid advertisers.

However, as far as anyone can tell right now, this will definitely also play a role in regular search engine results, at least when users are searching for a specific product (or when a search can be construed as product-related). When Google presumes that the user has a potential intent to purchase, they’ll offer up paid (sponsored) listings next to the Web search results, so that they’re actually the first thing users see. Although the organic results will remain the same, they will not necessarily be the focal point of the SERPs any longer.

Of course, these product listings are more than just text ads, as they feature images, descriptions, links to the retailer’s sites and the current price. All of this is presented as a single, separate experience from the rest of the search results.

Either multiple product listings partitioned off in their own “sponsored” box, or a single product can appear on the right side of the page that includes a more detailed description. The former is typically designated for more general product searches, while the latter is reserved for very specific product queries (see examples below).

This practice combines product ads and Google Product Search, and helps to ensure that the paid listings don’t actually affect the organic search results – if we’re still calling Google Search organic. While this is all currently in a very experimental beta period, it's clearly an idea to which Google appears committed.

So, what does this mean for online retail, Google ads and product search?

Well, for one, it will force merchants to keep their ads up-to-date and accurate, since they are going to be charged as advertising partners just for the opportunity to list their products. This will be easy for them, as Google Shopping ads will come complete with an API that merchants can use to update their listings.

Bidding will be different, as now merchants will no longer be competing for keywords, but rather bidding how much they’d be willing to pay, if their listings appear and get clicks or generate conversions. Higher rankings will then depend on a combination of perceived relevance and the price of the bid.

Theoretically, these Google Shopping listings will help weed out redundant or irrelevant results for searchers, making them more enticing to consumers and, thus, more profitable (or worth the investment) for retailers.

Most of all, this whole scheme seems to be Google’s attempt to combat major e-commerce retailers, specifically Amazon. Whereas before Amazon was something of a one-stop shop for consumers looking to buy online, Google has now presented itself as an (arguably more efficient) alternative, allowing users to base their purchasing decisions on more product options from a wider variety of retailers.

This could drastically alter the e-commerce landscape and give smaller online retailers a much better chance at competing with the big boys.

Of course, it also runs the risk of shutting out those same smaller businesses that don't have the budget to afford buying product listings. Those companies that survive on the Web largely through the existence of free product search listings could also see some negative effects from this change.

Details are slim at the moment, and there is no official word on when Google will do away with free product listings, but the company did state in a blog post that it would like to have Google Shopping up-and-running by the fall of 2012.

Merchants have two incentives for transitioning to the new format, a 10-percent monthly credit through 2012 for ads created by August 15, or a $100 AdWords credit for existing Product Search merchants who fill out a form by the same date.

Deliver Dynamic Content with Amazon CloudFront

Michael Garrity — Tue, 15 May 2012 11:00:00 GMT

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is helping businesses get more interactive by launching dynamic content support for Amazon CloudFront, giving customers a simple and cost-effective way to improve the performance, reliability and global reach of their sites and delivery of their content, including dynamic content that changes for every end-user.

AWS customers can accelerate all of the content on their websites, both dynamic and static, for a single price and no up-front fees.

The ability to deliver personalized, dynamic content through CloudFront saves businesses a lot of time and effort that used to go into improving the performance and reliability of the more dynamic aspects of their websites. Typically, this used to require custom codes that had to be written, and even then the solutions offered would be hard to configure and manage.

Now users can run all kinds of Web applications and accelerate their entire sites quickly through the AWS Management Console with no additional cost or architecture complexity. The experience even improves when dynamic content is delivered with origin servers running in EC2, as Amazon will monitor and streamline the network paths from each CloudFront edge location to the various AWS Regions, improving latency and reliability in the process.

Custom Affiliate Ads for Zen Cart & OSCommerce

Michael Garrity — Tue, 08 May 2012 02:34:00 GMT

Is your e-commerce store the next Amazon? Well, you can certainly try to be with new Euraffiliates software that gives Zen Cart and OSCommerce merchants Amazon-like affiliate widgets that they can use to display their products on affiliate websites.

Euraffiliates, the company responsible for the Next-G Affiliate software, created these widgets to help businesses skip the part of the affiliate marketing process where they’re required to get started with Web developers, graphic designers, copy writers, email marketers and all of the other individuals involved in the creation of an affiliate marketing campaign. Now, Zen Cart and OSCommerce store owners with knowledge of FTP uploads and copy pasting can be selling through affiliates in just hours, as the widgets will automate the early steps.

Users need only upload one zipped source file and some additional setups files and complete the setup wizard. After they’re situated, they’ll be able to upload a logo for use by affiliate marketers, change the “look-and-feel” of their marketing content and even customize the affiliate page content with online forms (the system will provide default content), including a customizable affiliate terms page.

Moreover, merchants can easily select desired products or categories and preview them, and then customize them, save the settings and copy a single line to code to publish these updated product banners to their websites. This new feature lets users easily generate customized product ads similar to those used by Amazon. All changes will be rendered automatically on the affiliate websites, as well.

OSCommerce and Zen Cart merchants can easily integrate the widgets into their stores by simply copying the integration code from the system and pasting it into the specified files in their websites.

CloudSearch from Amazon Brings Search to Apps

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 12:36:00 GMT

Amazon Web Services is giving developers a much sought after services that allows them to integrate search functionality into their applications.

Announced today, Amazon CloudSearch lets developers create a search domain, upload the data they want searchable. The service automatically provisions the technology resources required and deploys the search indexes needed.

What is so appealing about the new service, outside of the pay-as-you-go pricing, is that like other Amazon Web Services, the service can scale appropriately as the amount of searchable data increases or as the query rate changes. Developers will also be able to change search parameters, adjust search relevance and apply new settings without having to re-upload data.

“For many organizations, search plays a major role in how their customers experience their product or service - businesses need a sophisticated search capability to help their customers find the right information quickly. Implementing rich search functionality has traditionally been very expensive and time consuming due to the complexity of the technology required,” said Adam Selipsky, Vice President, Amazon Web Services. “Amazon CloudSearch frees customers from worrying about all of these complexities so they can easily launch powerful search functionality and pay only for the resources they use.”

CloudSearch, which uses the same technology (A9) that powers search on Amazon.com, is already being used by social music discovery platform ex.fm and nonprofit biomedical research company Sage BioNetworks.