Price Tags. Opportunity Cost.
The value of Amazon, like the value of Facebook, exists not in the website but in the user base. Would any 3rd-party sellers use Amazon’s Marketplace otherwise?
Amazon doesn’t market your items. It doesn’t help you invest in inventory, or develop new product lines — in most cases, it doesn’t warehouse the items for you, or help in fulfillment or shipping.
Amazon only makes your item available via a search, and for that privilege, takes up to 30% (or more?) of the sale. And the only value added is that it’s listed on Amazon, where the people are.
Amazon gained an advantage by getting *big* first. No one can catch up without massive investment and years of losses.
Please consider: it’s not so much that you use Amazon: Amazon is using you – and, on your behalf, is doing things you might not agree with
see also: Views inside & outside the Amazon-IPG dispute http://www.shelf-awareness.com/issue.html?issue=1675#m15160
Speaking of catching up, if B&N would sort out an agreement with 1mobile or GetJar to put their market in the B&N app market, as a paid app, under big fat boldface “B&N does not provide support for apps downloaded from this third party app store” disclaimer … and an agreement that they could designate specific apps as incompatible (specifically the Kindle reader and additional app stores, in particular Amazon’s) …
… B&N could catch up with the main Amazon app store advantage in about a week or two of filtering through the 3rd party app store, red flagging a few apps for possible filtering.
Since B&N app icons are bigger than regular Android market app icons, the 3rd party app store from the B&N app store could even be designed to automatically add a (yellow for caution?) band around the standard Android market icon, to flag it as a 3rd party download so counter staff don’t have to try to service it.
Set the price at $4.99, and all the people who root the device just to get the app for SB Nation and Crunchyroll (ahem) can dispense with the time and trouble, leaving it to the minority of actual tinkerers. Indeed, it’d likely to be $100K’s if not $m’s of quick cash flow in the slack period in the middle of spring semester.
Comment by BruceMcF — 1 March 2012, 01:00 #