Fishpond.co.nz
| Company Logo | |
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Retail |
| Founded | 2004 |
| Headquarters | Auckland , New Zealand |
Key people | Daniel Robertson, Founder and CEO, num_employees = 25(2007) |
| Products | Fishpond.co.nz Sell Yours Cash Rewards homepage = www.fishpond.co.nz |
| Revenue | unknown |
| unknown | |
Fishpond.co.nz, Ltd. is a New Zealand e-commerce company based in Auckland, New Zealand. It was one of the first major companies to sell books over the Internetin New Zealand.
Founded by Daniel Robertson in 2004 Fishpond.co.nz began as an online linux retailer and soon diversified into linux books, before evolving into a full-scale bookstore, though it soon diversified its product lines, adding DVDs music CDs, computer software and video games,
Fishpond has established a separate website in [[Australia]
History and business model
Fishpond was founded in 2004, after Daniel decided, 3 1/2 years into an electrical engineering degree, that he would rather run a business....any business. It started of as linuxshop.co.nz, which had the catchphrase: turning kiwis into penguins. After initially testing the online retail market by selling open source linux software, he began selling books about Linux also. The substantially higher margin was what spurred him on to widen the target market. The company began operating as a full fledged online bookstore under the name fishpond.co.nz. The opportunity was that brick and mortar bookstores had not yet invested in their internet presence. This was on account of the poor broadband infrastructure that was prevalent at the time in New Zealand, and also the lack of any credible online threat: Amzon was too far, took too long, and cost too much in shipping. The same issues were seen as an opportunity to enter the marketplace. Encouraged by Tradme's successful adpaptation of the [ebay] model, Fishpond began replicating Amazon's.
Unlike [Amazon.com], Fishpond lacked the war chest with which to run at a loss for even months, let alone years. The company has been profitable since inception, carefully using profits to grow the company. Having started as a one man band, Fishpond is now 25 employees strong, after just 3 years in the market. Fishpond continues to take market share from online competitors, while encouraging [offline] shoppers to convert to [online]
The company has continued to grow, as more and more people upgrade to broadband internet in New Zealand. The company also services the Australian marketplace through a seperate website. The Autralian market is 4 times bigger than New Zealand and offers tremendous growth potetntial. Growth is also supported by ever growing book, CD and DVD catalogues.
Locations
Headquarters
The company's global headquarters is located in Auckland, New Zealand. It has a satellite office in Australia also.
Software development centers
The company employs software developers in Auckland and Christchurch.
Product lines
Amazon has steadily branched into retail sales of music CDs, videotapes and DVDs, software, consumer electronics, kitchen items, tools, lawn and garden items, toys & games, baby products, apparel, sporting goods, gourmet food, jewellery, watches, health and personal-care items, beauty products, musical instruments, industrial & scientific supplies, groceries and more.
The company launched Amazon.com Auctions, its own Web auctions service, in March 1999. However it failed to chip away at industry pioneer eBay's juggernaut growth. Amazon Auctions was followed by the launch of a fixed-price marketplace business called zShops in September 1999, and a failed Sotheby's/Amazon partnership called sothebys.amazon.com in November. Although zShops failed to live up to its expectations, it laid the groundwork for the hugely successful Amazon Marketplace service launched in 2001 that let customers sell used books, CDs, DVDs, and other products alongside new items. Amazon Marketplace's main rival today is eBay's half.com service.
Website
A popular feature of Amazon is the ability for users to submit reviews to the web page of each product. As part of their review, users must rate the product on a rating scale from one to five stars. Such rating scales provide a basic idea of the popularity and dependability of a product.
Search Inside the Book is a feature which makes it possible for customers to search for keywords in the full text of many books in the catalog. The feature started out with 120,000 titles (or 33 million pages of text) on October 23, 2003. There are currently about 250,000 books in the program. Amazon has cooperated with around 130 publishers to allow users to perform these searches. To avoid copyright violations, Amazon.com does not return the computer-readable text of the book but rather a picture of the page containing the found excerpt, disables printing of the pages, and puts limits on the number of pages in a book a single user can access. Amazon is planning to launch Search Inside the Book internationally. Additionally, customers can purchase access to read the entire book online via the Amazon Upgrade program, although the selection of books eligible for this service is currently limited.
According to information in Amazon.com discussion forums, Amazon derives about 40% of its sales from affiliates, whom they call "Associates." An Associate is essentially an independent seller or business that receives a commission for referring customers to the Amazon.com site. Associates do this by placing links on their websites to the Amazon homepage or to specific products. If a referral results in a sale, the Associate receives a commission from Amazon. By the end of 2003, Amazon had signed up almost one million Associates. Associates can access the Amazon catalog directly on their websites by using the Amazon Web Services (AWS) XML service. Amazon was the first online business to set up an Associates program. The idea has since been copied by many other online businesses. AStore is a new Associates product that gives the power to create a professional online store, in minutes and without the need for programming skills, that can be embedded within or linked to from your website.
Innovations
Amazon S3
Amazon wikis
EC2
Amapedia
Amazon Mechanical Turk
Amazon honor system
Donations
Controversies
Trademark infringement
Patent use
Patent infringement
Shipping destinations
Customer service
Amazon.com does not publish its toll-free customer service number (+1-800-201-7575) on its own web site. Customers are instead asked to submit written service requests (which are answered by e-mail) or to use a click-to-call service to be connected by phone to an available service representative.[1] There are numerous Web pages that exist solely to publish the Amazon.com customer service phone numbers, one of which received in excess of 23,000 visits in December 2004 alone.[2] Despite the perceived difficulty in reaching customer service by phone, "[n]o retailer or service provider in ACSI has higher customer satisfaction than Amazon."[3]
Labor relations
Third-party seller pricing
Amazon.com permits third-party sellers to sell items for more than their MSRP. For instance, as of April 27, 2007, several third-party sellers offer the Wii video game console -- which is out of stock at Amazon proper -- for prices starting at $369.00 versus an MSRP of $249.00.[4]
Trivia
 | This article contains a list of miscellaneous information. |
- Douglas Hofstadter's Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought was the first book sold by Amazon.com on July 15, 1995.[5]
- Some of the words in Amazon.com URLs, usually referring to various components of the company's web site software, are nods to the Amazon River and Brazil:
- obidos (the name of the old page-rendering engine) comes from Óbidos, the meeting place of the Amazon's tributaries;
- várzea is Portuguese (Brazil's main language) for a forest flooded after heavy rains, as parts of the Amazon forest are;
- gp is short for Gurupa (the page-rendering system that had completely replaced Obidos by late 2006), a region in Brazil near the mouth of the Amazon.
- Similarly Brazil- or Amazon-themed names are used for many other Amazon.com software systems less exposed to the end users, e.g.:
- one of the mass mail sending systems is Correios (after the Brazilian postal service);
- the source code version control system is Brazil;
- a remote procedure call protocol is Iquitos;
- Urubamba is a software system interacting with Google's AdSense.
- A 2002 glitch in Amazon.com's review system revealed that many well-established authors were anonymously giving themselves glowing reviews, with some revealed to be anonymously giving "rival" authors terrible reviews. The glitch in the system was fixed and those reviews have since been removed or made anonymous.[citation needed]
- An easter egg can be found on Amazon.com's website. An invisible link at the very bottom of the "Directory of All Stores" page leads to a February 2002 tribute to David Risher, "Amazon.com's favorite site surfer."
See also
- Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN)
- Kimba Kano: Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox add-on, which adds built-in Amazon.com searching (formerly known as Coeus).
- Statistically Improbable Phrases: Amazon.com's phrase extraction technique for indexing books.
- Amazon.com's Editors' Picks: Music 2004, 2005, Books 2004, 2005
References
- ^ Amazon.com Click-to-Call feature: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/contact-us/call-me.html/?skip=true
- ^ http://clicheideas.com/amazon.htm
- ^ http://www.theacsi.org/fourth_quarter.htm, http://www.theacsi.org/scores_commentaries/commentaries/Q4_05_comm.htm
- ^ Amazon Nintendo Wii Used & New Page
- ^ Amazon.com's company timeline
Further reading
- Robert Spector (2001). amazon.com--Get Big Fast: Inside the Revolutionary Business Model That Changed the World. Harper Collins Publishers. ISBN 0-06-662041-4.
- Mike Daisey (2002). 21 Dog Years. Free Press. ISBN 0-7432-2580-5.
- Mara Friedman (2004). Amazon.com for Dummies. Wiley Publishing. ISBN 0-7645-5840-4.
- James Marcus (2004). Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut. W.W. Norton. ISBN 1-56584-870-5.
- Amazon No Longer the Role Model for E-Commerce Design (2005).
- A conversation with Werner Vogels, the CTO of Amazon, ACM Queue vol.4, no.4 - May 2006.
External links
- Amazon.com
- International Amazon Sites
- Amazon.com press information
- Amazon.com investor relations
- Search Amazon.com by ISBN
- Search Amazon.com by Amazon Prime
- Summary of Amazon.com's terms of service
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