Amazon Pushes Fashion, Prime, and Consumer Electronics

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 13, 4:44PM EST · Published Nov 27, 9:16AM EST

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Amazon Pushes Fashion, Prime, and Consumer Electronics — © Amazon.com Inc.

Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) fought a battle on two fronts on Black Friday. In the first, it heavily promoted membership to its Prime service, which includes streaming video and aims at Apple’s (NASDAQ: AAPL) and Netfix (NASDAQ: NFLX) similar services. On the other front, it slashed prices and aggressively marketed consumer electronics and fashion, working against Best Buy (NYSE: BBY) and large department stores.

Prime membership additions is the harder fight of the two. Apple and Netflix already have tens of millions of customers and are well established in the streaming video business. Each has tremendous financial reserves and well honed marketing skills. The edge Amazon has its its free delivery service, which, especially during the holidays, gives Prime an advantage.

Consumer electronics and fashion are sectors in which Amazon has been winner the fight against bricks and mortar retailers for year. The National Retailer Federation recently presented research about how rapidly e-commerce has posted gains:

Almost half of holiday shopping, consisting of browsing and buying, will be done online: average consumers say 46 percent of their shopping (both browsing and buying) this holiday season will be conducted online, up from 44 percent last year.

Best Buy and department stores do not have a large enough presence online to counter this. Macy’s (NYSE: M) and Best Buy recently reported disappointing quarterly results. Online business has not fill in the hole hole created by falling same-store sales.

Amazon’s tactics aimed at retailers can be summed up in its large holiday promotion:

Black Friday Deals are here! Skip the lines and shop Black Friday deals from anywhere, even your couch. We have thousands of limited-time Lightning Deals for you to choose from, exciting Deals of the Day, and savings on your favorite electronics, toys, jewelry and more. These limited-supply deals will go quickly, but we’ll add new deals as often as every 5 minutes so you can be sure to find a great deal!

“Skip the lines” explains in one phrase Amazon’s advantage.

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.