Mr. Broadhead, a consultant and an author of e-commerce books, has spent about $1,000 this year on items like a sign from the receiving dock of an eToys warehouse, a Garden.com stock certificate and martini glasses bearing the Furniture.com insignia.
After all, as the publishing columnist for The New York Observer and a senior contributing editor at Glamour, Nelson is more concerned with the commerce of book publishing than with art; she is interested in examining not the books themselves but the impulse to pick them up.
In effect, the operator bills the user on behalf of the content provider, and then hands over the money.In theory, reverse billing could be used as a means of payment for online commerce; a book, CD or cinema ticket could be charged directly to the user, as though it were an expensive phone call.
In contrast to the commodity products that have dominated online commerce -- books, movies, music -- the force driving RedEnvelope and other specialty retailers is margin.
Mr. Albert was born in a low-income neighborhood known as Strawberry Patch; he graduated from Mamaroneck High School in 1956 and tried to make a go of it in local commerce, opening a book and record shop on Mamaroneck Avenue.
An Amazon tablet could tie together the seemingly disparate parts of the company's business, Mr. McQuivey said, including e-commerce, e-books, video and audio.
It has built up a vast network of services around e-commerce, e-books (through Kobo) and video streaming and financial services that it's looking to cross-leverage to grow.
As with other areas of e-commerce like books, food delivery and design/fashion, travel been undergoing a lot of consolidation, with smaller players coming together to compete better against behemoths like Sabre (which owns Travelocity, among others), Priceline (Kayak, Booking.com and more) and others in a business that is built around margins that are always under pressure.
At one time or other, the endangered species list of commerce has included books, bricks-and-mortar stores and business travel for face-to-face meetings.
Based on an earlier standard from transaction processing, it represents a simplified version of a typical e-commerce application an electronic book store.
No longer content with simply demanding steeper discounts from publishers like Hachette — which is locked in a bitter fight with the e-commerce giant over book prices — Amazon is finally reaching its end goal: the complete dissolution of the traditional book business model through a vertically integrated publishing platform, from writer to Kindle.
