Amazon (AMZN) Launches Huge “Black Friday” Salvo

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Mar 30, 2:10PM EDT · Published Nov 23, 6:19AM EST

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Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) will not wait until the day after Thanksgiving to begin its holiday sales. It wants to take whatever early shopping business it can get from Wal-Mart (NYSE:WMT), Target (NYSE:TGT), and Best Buy (NYSE:BBY) now.

Amazon today announced huge discounts on a number of popular items.

The world’s largest e-commerce company has moved prices on HP (NYSE:HPQ) netbooks to $199.99. It is hard to see how the retailer can make much if any money on that. Amazon has cut the prices on some DVDs as low as $7.99.

Some consumer electronics prices have been cut by especially big amounts. LG HDTV prices have come down from $1,400 to $867.

Amazon has also cut prices on a great deal of its jewelry and watch collections by over 60%.

Investors will be watching Amazon’s margins for the fourth quarter. The company is taking a big risk. Its sales may move up because of discounting, but tts gross margins could move way down. Jeff Bezos has had a remarkable run as America’s retail marketing genius. If he prices his inventory too low to pick up market share, that run may end.

Douglas A. McIntyre

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.