Welcome to RepricerExpress’ weekly round-up of the top five stories from the world of Amazon and ecommerce.
Amazon Alexa to reward kids who say “Please”: BBC News reports that Amazon’s smart assistant Alexa can now be made to encourage children to say: “Please,” and: “Thank you,” when issuing it voice commands. The new function addresses some parents’ concerns that use of the technology was teaching their offspring to sound officious or even rude. In addition, parents can now set time limits on when requests are responded to and can block some services. Continue reading…
Amazon is reportedly working on its first home robot: James Vincent at The Verge that Amazon is reportedly developing its first robot for the home. The project has been given the internal codename “Vesta,” named after the Roman goddess of the hearth. It’s being developed by Lab126, the Amazon hardware R&D centre that previously built the Kindle, Fire Phone, and Echo. Continue reading…
Amazon sellers chasing $1 billion in sales: Joe at Marketplace Pulse reports that Amazon has confirmed that there are 140,000 sellers with more than $100,000 sales a year as of last year. By most estimates the worldwide marketplace GMV last year was north of $135 billion. But there is little detail available beyond that. In his most recent annual shareholder letter, Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos, wrote that 300,000 US-based businesses started selling on the Amazon.com marketplace last year. Continue reading…
The two-pizza rule and the secret of Amazon’s success: Alex Hern at The Guardian reports that in the early days of Amazon, Jeff Bezos instituted a rule: every internal team should be small enough that it can be fed with two pizzas. The goal wasn’t to cut down on the catering bill. It was, like almost everything Amazon does, focused on two aims: efficiency and scalability. Continue reading…
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos explains his famous one-character emails, known to strike fear in manager’s hearts: Julie Bort at Insider reports that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has a notorious habit of sending his executives an email which has a single character: a question mark. When the executive gets an email from Bezos that simply says “?” they know that Bezos is concerned about something because a customer complained. Continue reading…
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