Intelligent charger yby 001 018

Amazon/Competitors/Checking out New York’s online grocery stores and all their trimmings.docx
Checking out New York’s online grocery stores and all their trimmings
Newer services offer smaller order minimums and shorter delivery windows
By Anne Kadet, Wall Street Journal, 20 November 2018

Faster grocery delivery services are battling for business.

Faster grocery delivery services are battling for business. PHOTO: TIM BOWER
All seems relatively peaceful on the streets of New York these days. But in truth, there is a battle afoot—between online grocery services competing to offer same-day delivery. They’re fighting for space in your pantry. They want to deliver your Thanksgiving turkey.

New York’s busy families have long relied on traditional online grocery delivery services like FreshDirect and Amazon Fresh for big shipments, typically scheduled a day in advance.

But as this market matures, attention has turned to the more spontaneous shopper. The newer services feature smaller order minimums, faster online shopping and shorter delivery windows.

Last week, on a Monday morning, I placed orders with three of the more high-profile competitors in this space—FoodKick, Amazon Prime Now and Jet—to compare them on selection, ease of ordering, price and delivery. I now have enough baby carrots to last me through Christmas.

I tried to order the same set of 20 grocery items from each service—products on my regular shopping list, including Cafe Bustelo, grilled chicken breast strips, a red onion, thinkThin protein bars and a small bottle of dish detergent. When a service offered several choices for the same sort of item, I selected the cheapest option. I timed how long it took me to place the order and how long it took for the order to arrive.

FoodKick, which FreshDirect launched in Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan in 2016, uses a strategy typical of the genre. While its parent company makes deliveries on company trucks, FoodKick uses third-party couriers. It offers deliveries within the hour for $5.99 or within a chosen one-hour window for $3.99.

FoodKick is the most fun of the three, suggesting bread, cheese and butter pairings for the ultimate grilled cheese sandwich, for example. Its “Trending Now” chart, meanwhile, details what’s currently popular with customers (last week: ground bison and salty caramel Raw Bliss Balls).

The selection is more pared down. While FreshDirect offers 24 kinds of lettuce, for example, FoodKick offers 10. This made ordering simple and straightforward. In fact, my FoodKick order was the only one on which I didn’t make a goofy mistake. It is the best option if you’re drunk, in a hurry or just too tired to think.

On the downside, FoodKick offered just 13 of the 20 items on my shopping list. And it is expensive. A pound of cashews cost $11.49, for example, compared with $7.99 on Amazon Prime Now. On average, items on my shopping list cost about 25% more on FoodKick than on Amazon or Jet.

FoodKick says its average prices can be higher because it focuses on high-quality products and premium brands. Amazon and Jet both say they offer customers a choice, including premium options.

I was pleased with my FoodKick delivery. Upon placing my order at 9:18 a.m., I chose the earliest available one-hour slot, between 11:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. My order arrived at 11:53 a.m. with no errors.

Amazon Prime Now launched in Manhattan in 2014, offering one-hour delivery of essential groceries such as milk and eggs along with convenience items like razors. This summer, it added delivery from Whole Foods Market. It is available throughout New York City.

The service offers free delivery within a two-hour window for orders over $35. Delivery within a chosen one-hour window costs $4.99; delivery within the hour costs $7.99.

I was impressed to find Amazon Prime Now offered 19 of the 20 items on my list, typically at prices lower than my local Key Food supermarket.

Amazon Prime Now offers one-hour delivery and is available throughout New York City.

Amazon Prime Now offers one-hour delivery and is available throughout New York City. PHOTO:MARK LENNIHAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS
When I tried to complete the purchase, however, I realized I had unwittingly created two separate orders—one from a nearby Whole Foods and one from the local Amazon Prime Now hub. To receive all my items, I’d have to arrange two deliveries.

An Amazon spokeswoman advised using the site’s “Shop by Store” option, which filters the selection and avoids creating separate orders.

Upon placing my order at 8:50 a.m., I chose the next available two-hour slot, between 10 a.m. and noon. My delivery arrived at 10:53 a.m. and was faultless—aside from a chocolate protein bar substituted for the out-of-stock peanut butter variety.

I got frustrated with Walmart -owned Jet, which relaunched in September with a new “City Grocery” service offering same-day delivery.

While it offered 16 of the 20 items on my shopping list—at prices similar to Amazon’s—the unwieldy site, with its broad selection, had me spending 25 minutes to create my order compared with 17 minutes on FoodKick and 14 on Amazon. The confusing interface also had me ordering a case of seltzer when I meant to buy a single bottle.

The company says it aims to be a one-stop shopping experience that delivers food as well as general merchandise and holiday gifts that resonate with New Yorkers.

I got several error messages before my Jet order went through, and found the earliest delivery available was a three-hour window in the evening. I wouldn’t be home, so I had to schedule one for the next morning.

Jet says it currently ships from fulfillment centers in the greater New York City area but will soon be delivering from a new center in the Bronx and will consider shortening delivery windows and expanding cutoff times for same-day delivery.

The upside: when my Jet order arrived at 9:33 a.m. the next morning, it included everything I ordered, including that whole case of seltzer.

Water and baby carrots! Let the festivities begin.

Amazon/Grocery/2018/Online grocery sales to reach $100 billion in 2025_ Amazon is current and future leader.docx
Online grocery sales to reach $100 billion in 2025; Amazon is current and future leader
Pamela N. Danziger, Forbes, 18 January 2018

(TOMMASO BODDI/AFP/Getty Images)
Online grocery sales are predicted to capture 20% of total grocery retail by 2025 to reach $100 billion in consumer sales, according to study by the Food Marketing Institute conducted by Nielsen. While estimates of online grocery’s share of the total $641b U.S. grocery market vary, from 2% to 4.3% according FMI-Nielsen, it is the next major retail sector to be disrupted by ecommerce.

Not unexpectedly, Amazon is leading the charge. Today, Amazon’s share of the online grocery market stands at 18%, according to a new study One Click Retail, which compiles data for the world’s ecommerce marketplaces. With an estimated $2 billion in food and beverage sales, Amazon stands head and shoulders above its closest competitor, Walmart, with roughly half of Amazon’s market share.

While consumers have been slower to adopt online shopping in grocery due to entrenched shopping habits for this most frequently purchased category and preference to personally examine and pick fresh meat and produce, online purveyors have helped consumers learn to like online grocery shopping and delivery by leading with packaged foods.

Amazon’s most popular grocery category is beverages, followed by No. 2 coffee, No. 3 snack foods, No. 4 breakfast foods and No. 5 candy. Starting with these non-perishables consumers get the feel for online ordering and delivery and gain confidence to include dairy, meat, frozen foods and fruits and vegetables in their next order.

For Amazon’s loyal shoppers, its Prime Members, estimated to number 80-90 million, though the company doesn’t release those numbers, it offers Prime Pantry, a place to order everyday household basics, packaged foods and grocery items. Prime Pantry also features weekly deals and coupons just like the local grocery store.

Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods, a brand renowned for quality in meat, fruit and vegetables and other perishables, is also helping propel Amazon’s grocery strategies further with an assist from Whole Food’s 365 Everyday Value private label packaged goods brand, as well as Amazon’s own Happy Belly coffee and spices, Mama Bear baby foods, and Wickedly Prime snack foods.

In just four months since the acquisition, Whole Foods' 365 Everyday Value brand jumped to being Amazon’s second best-selling private-label brand after AmazonBasics, according to One Click Retail.

Consumers are growing more comfortable ordering groceries online
Increasingly consumers are gaining confidence in buying their groceries online. A July 2017 Gallup Poll found about 20% of consumers had purchased groceries online in the past, with 9% reporting purchasing them once a month or more frequently. On a global basis PwC Global found roughly the same level of penetration in consumers adopting online shopping for groceries but with ordering fresh produce online remaining the biggest hurdle. According to Nielsen, only about 9% of North American consumers have made that leap.

But Amazon has a strategy for that: AmazonFresh. It’s a same-day delivery service currently available in Seattle, Northern California, Southern California, New York, and Philadelphia areas, but with many more metropolitan areas planned in the near future.

Amazon’s efforts to grow its grocery business are paying off, according to a recent survey among Amazon customers by Feedvisor. In that survey of 1,500 Amazon customers, nearly one-fourth said they are more likely to purchase groceries from Amazon now that Whole Foods is part of the Amazon family of brands, with nearly 40% saying they will now consider such purchases from Amazon.

“As more customers become familiar with purchasing groceries online,” says Claudia Hoeffner, vice president, global marketing at Feedvisor, “we expect Amazon’s grocery offerings to take it even further.”

With Amazon’s early lead in online grocery and its momentum growing thanks to the Whole Foods acquisition, Prime Pantry, Prime Fresh and its already loyal legions of Prime customers, Amazon is already way out in front in the online grocery battle. And its distance ahead of its followers is only going to grow in the future.

© Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

Copy created under fair use guidelines for education.

Amazon/Grocery/2018/Amazon’s cashierless ‘Go’ convenience store set to open.docx
Amazon’s cashierless ‘Go’ convenience store set to open
Online retailer says, after yearlong delay, it finally has trained its in-store algorithms
By Laura Stevens, Wall Street Journal, 21 January 2018

Pedestrians walked past an Amazon Go store in Seattle in April 2017. The cashierless convenience store, which had been open only to employees for testing purposes, is scheduled to open to the public on Monday after a yearlong delay.

Pedestrians walked past an Amazon Go store in Seattle in April 2017. The cashierless convenience store, which had been open only to employees for testing purposes, is scheduled to open to the public on Monday after a yearlong delay. PHOTO: ELAINE THOMPSON/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Nearly a year after it was promised, Amazon.com Inc.’s AMZN 0.21% cashierless convenience store is slated to open to the public on Monday.

The new Amazon Go store, located in the base of Amazon’s main headquarters in Seattle, uses computer vision and machine-learning algorithms to track shoppers and charge them for what they select, thereby eliminating checkout counters.

In an interview last week, Dilip Kumar, vice president of technology for Amazon Go and Amazon Books, said testing with employees has trained the technology to work in the store, an experiment that is part of the company’s broader effort to reinvent how consumers shop.

Mr. Kumar declined to say whether Amazon will expand the Go concept, although he said the company has developed the technology to scale.

Amazon unveiled its first small-format grocery store, Amazon Go, on Monday. It’s one of at least three formats of brick-and-mortar food stores the online retail giant is exploring. Photo: Amazon.com Inc. (Originally published Dec. 5, 2016)

Amazon announced the new Go store with fanfare in December 2016, and said it would open to the public in early 2017. The opening was delayed, however, as the technology proved more difficult to master than expected, with glitches occurring when too many people were in the store or were moving too quickly, The Wall Street Journal reported in March 2017.

Amazon didn’t explain the delay at the time. According to Mr. Kumar, while the store was originally expected to quickly open to the public to gain extra traffic needed for testing, the company decided it had enough employees to teach the system instead.

That training helped Amazon Go’s technology better identify objects and follow the different speeds and patterns of shoppers, tasks Mr. Kumar described as particularly challenging in a crowd.

Some people “move in very unpredictable ways,” Mr. Kumar said. “You’re always bending down, you’re examining items, you’re picking things up.”

The Go experiment shows how Amazon is trying to transform shopping in physical stores after decades of pioneering retail online. Since 2015, the company also has added more than a dozen Amazon Books stores, which encourage customers to pull out their phones to scan covers for prices.

In August, Amazon completed a $13.5 billion deal to buy grocery chain Whole Foods, adding 470 brick-and-mortar stores to its portfolio overnight.

Amazon Go’s technology uses cameras throughout the store to track shoppers once they are inside, though it doesn’t use facial recognition, Mr. Kumar said. A customer entering the store scans his or her phone and then becomes represented internally as a 3-D object to the system. Cameras also are pointed at the shelves to determine interactions with goods.

Among the challenges for the technology was telling the difference between similar looking products—say containers of vanilla and regular yogurt. Adding to the complexity, when customers pick up products, they usually cover the distinguishing aspects of the label with their hands.

Shoppers browse the items at the Amazon Go store in Seattle during its employee-only testing phase. The store uses computer vision and machine-learning algorithms to track shoppers.

Shoppers browse the items at the Amazon Go store in Seattle during its employee-only testing phase. The store uses computer vision and machine-learning algorithms to track shoppers. PHOTO: ELAINE THOMPSON/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Some store associates are still needed. For example, customers purchasing alcohol must show identification.

Former Amazon executives say it likely would be difficult to scale the system to track people in a bigger store, and that it could take years to make it work in a larger store footprint. Still, they say it may make sense one day for Amazon to try to implement the technology more widely—either via additional Go stores or even in Whole Foods.

Mr. Kumar said there are currently no plans to introduce the technology in Whole Foods. He added, however, that every project should be expandable.

“We have this unwritten rule that whatever it is you’re building, you have to be able to scale it so that it covers significantly amount of more load than what you would normally ever expect,” Mr. Kumar said.

Amazon/Operations/Amazon targets unprofitable items, with a sharper focus on the bottom line.docx
Amazon targets unprofitable items, with a sharper focus on the bottom line
Online giant pushes for changes in product packaging, quantities to improve earnings
By Laura Stevens, Sharon Terlep and Annie Gasparro, Wall Street Journal, 16 December 2018

Inside the Amazon Fulfillment Center in Fall River, Mass.

Inside the Amazon Fulfillment Center in Fall River, Mass. PHOTO: ADAM GLANZMAN FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Amazon.com Inc. AMZN 0.21% has trained people to buy everything from major appliances to daily staples online. Now it is having second thoughts about some of those sales because they don’t make money—and is pushing big brands to change how they use its site.

Inside Amazon, the items are known as CRaP, short for “Can’t Realize a Profit.” Think bottled beverages or snack foods. The products tend to be priced at $15 or less, are sold directly by Amazon, and are heavy or bulky and therefore costly to ship—characteristics that make for thin or nonexistent margins.

Now, as Amazon focuses more on its bottom line in addition to its rapid growth, it is increasingly taking aim at CRaP products, according to major brand executives and people familiar with the company’s thinking. In recent months, it has been eliminating unprofitable items and pressing manufacturers to change their packaging to better sell online, according to brands that sell on Amazon and consultants who work with them.

One example: bottled water from Coca-Cola Co.Amazon used to have a $6.99 six-pack of Smartwater as the default order on some of its Dash buttons, a small device that allows for automatic reordering with a single press. But in August, after working with Coca-Cola to change how it ships and sells the water, Amazon notified Dash customers it was changing that default item to a 24-pack for $37.20.

That raised the price per bottle to $1.55 from $1.17. And Coca-Cola will start shipping those orders directly to consumers, sparing Amazon the expense of shipping from its warehouses. Manufacturers shipping from their warehouses is something Amazon has asked more brands to do to cut its own costs.

Amazon told Coca-Cola that it was losing money on the smaller, cheaper shipments, according to people familiar with the matter.

Coca-Cola responds that it works with partners to learn together and constantly evolves its offerings.

Moves like that can increase costs for brands. Amazon can get away with it because manufacturers of food and household products are hooked on the online retailer’s size—it accounts for a majority of total e-commerce revenue growth—say consultants who work with brands on their online strategy.

For big consumer brands, not being on Amazon “is not an option anymore,” said Guru Hariharan, chief executive of Boomerang Commerce, which makes e-commerce software. “They have the power; they have the shoppers.”

Amazon also has greater leeway to curb CRaP items because of the rise of independent sellers on its site. They have added hundreds of millions of items, helping ensure that Amazon’s virtual shelves are stocked with the variety shoppers expect. And those sales tend to be more profitable for Amazon, which typically collects a 15% cut plus fees for warehousing.

Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky said earlier this year that eliminating CRaP items is “something that we do and work with our vendors on all the time,” adding that it hasn’t caused a change in profitability for the company in 2018.

Amazon, like other retailers, has made changes to inventory when an item isn’t selling well and is unprofitable. It also has moved some products-—such as its smaller package of Smartwater—into its Prime Pantry category, in which consumers fill up a box with items to reduce the cost of shipping.

Amazon is trying to boost profitability in its core retail business after years of focusing on growth, according to the people. The company’s profit has risen sharply in the past couple of years, helping its stock price soar, although its market value has fallen again recently. But most of that profitability has stemmed from its growing cloud business and advertising unit.

Brand executives privately say Amazon’s push for profitability can be a double-edged sword. Amazon has pressured them to lower prices and change packaging, both of which can be costly. And eliminating or changing what they sell on Amazon can hurt sales.

Some executives, however, say it can help both companies.

A worker gathers products for a shipment at an Amazon fulfillment center in Italy.

A worker gathers products for a shipment at an Amazon fulfillment center in Italy. PHOTO:GIULIO NAPOLITANO/BLOOMBERG NEWS
Seventh Generation, a Unilever PLC unit that makes plant-based household products, has altered its Amazon selling strategy in recent months after talking with Amazon about improving the profitability of products for sale on the platform, said CEO Joey Bergstein.

Mr. Bergstein said his company has developed new product formats that are more profitable to sell online—on Amazon or elsewhere. Amazon is “really clear that they have a profitability threshold,” he said. “We’ve been clear about saying, ‘Let’s make sure what we’re selling is profitable, and we’re not just lining Amazon’s pockets.’”

That has meant selling smaller, lighter laundry products like detergent pods and skipping cheaper paper towels. Instead of promoting a three-pack of dish soap, Seventh Generation recently started advertising a 6-pack for $17.70, and it created a larger, 504-count package of baby wipes for $19.91 for sale on Amazon and elsewhere.

Mars Wrigley Confectionery and Kellogg Co. executives said they have seen an uptick in products Amazon has dubbed unprofitable over the past year, although they wouldn’t say which items. But they are taking steps to change. Mars, for example, has seen better success on Amazon in selling bigger bags of Life Savers or Dove Promises, a spokeswoman said, and it has better figured out how to offer products online that shoppers want for different occasions.

Campbell Soup Co. , which like Coca-Cola ships some products directly to consumers who buy online, is revamping packaging for Amazon for items such as Campbell’s Chunky Soup and Pepperidge Farm Goldfish crackers, which are typically cheap at the store but relatively heavy to ship.

Campbell now uses predictive technology to monitor pricing dynamics so that it can adjust sizes, change the variety or redesign packaging to ensure the products will be profitable enough to stay on Amazon.

© Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

Copy created under fair use guidelines for education.

Amazon/Operations/Amazon expands into ocean freight.docx
Amazon expands into ocean freight
Move marks online retail giant’s latest step in effort to build out its delivery business
By Laura Stevens, Wall Street Journal, 25 January 2017

Freighters and cargo containers in Long Beach, Calif. Amazon has helped ship at least 150 containers of goods from China since October.

Freighters and cargo containers in Long Beach, Calif. Amazon has helped ship at least 150 containers of goods from China since October.PHOTO: REUTERS
Amazon.com Inc. AMZN -0.37% is taking to the high seas.

The online retail giant has begun handling shipment of goods by ocean to its U.S. warehouses from Chinese merchants selling on its site—taking on a role it previously left to global freight-transportation companies.

The move marks Amazon’s latest step in a multiyear effort to build out its delivery business. The company doesn’t own or operate ships, but is openly acting as a global freight forwarder and third-party logistics provider, categories of companies that book space on ocean vessels and truck goods between ports and warehouses.

Amazon has helped ship at least 150 containers of goods from China since October, according to shipping documents collected at ports of entry that were compiled by Ocean Audit, a company specializing in ocean-freight refund recovery for shippers.

This month, Amazon started posting rates for new services such as sorting, labeling, and trucking shipments that traditionally are handled by global freight companies. The services and rates were posted under the name of its Chinese subsidiary, Beijing Century Joyo Courier Service Co., with Distribution-Publications Inc., a widely used platform for such information.

Amazon declined to comment.

Amazon previously had registered itself with a federal agency overseeing ocean transportation, a step toward allowing it to serve as an intermediary for suppliers shipping merchandise in or out of the U.S.

“Amazon has integrated all those services into one basket,” said Steve Ferreira, chief executive of Ocean Audit. Building this type of shipping product offers “a lot of strategic value,” Mr. Ferreira added.

Its new steps to press ahead with ocean-shipping operations move Amazon into direct competition for business that previously was handled by companies including United Parcel Service Inc. and FedEx Corp. It brings Amazon a step further in laying the groundwork for its own plans, outlined in a September story in The Wall Street Journal, to one day haul and deliver packages and cargo for others as well as itself.

Amazon also plans to lease 40 cargo jets and bought branded semi trailers. The company has said that it needs to build out its delivery business to ensure the ability to deliver the growing amount of merchandise its customers order.

The move into ocean freight “is a great example of how Amazon’s expanding its logistical footprint, as well as getting deeper into customers’ supply chains,” said John Haber, chief executive of supply-chain consultancy Spend Management Experts. “This is just another cog in the supply chain that they’re putting under their control, as well as creating new revenue streams.”

According to the documents discovered by Ocean Audit, bills of lading dating back to October list Amazon Logistics as a named party, signaling it has entered into an agreement with another party to provide ocean-freight services. The parties shipping with Amazon primarily appear to be Chinese sellers on its website that use its “Fulfillment by Amazon” service, which allows merchants to store items at Amazon’s warehouses that Amazon then packs and ships when they are sold.

“They’ve made it so easy for these small, medium Chinese suppliers to make it into the supply chain,” adds Mr. Ferreira. Meanwhile, “Amazon is slowly building up a lot of volume.”

© Dow Jones & Company

Copy created under fair use guidelines for education.

Amazon/Publishing/‘They own the system’_ Amazon rewrites book industry by marching into publishing.docx
‘They own the system’: Amazon rewrites book industry by marching into publishing
The retail giant, the world’s largest public company, commands an unrivaled customer base for the books, e-books and audiobooks it publishes
By Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, Wall Street Journal, 16 January 2019

Amazon.com Inc., AMZN 0.18% which over more than two decades made itself the world’s largest book retailer, has created an unrivaled display window that can catapult titles from obscurity to must-reads.

More recently it has built something else: Its own line of published books.

When veteran book author Mark Sullivan tried to sell a World War II saga in 2015, eight New York book publishers rejected it. Then Amazon’s publishing arm scooped up “Beneath a Scarlet Sky” for an advance in the low five figures.

The novel was released in 2017 and featured on Amazon First Reads. The online promotion also is emailed each month to more than 7 million U.S. subscribers and exclusively showcases titles from Amazon Publishing.

“Wham, we get 300,000 downloads,” said Mr. Sullivan, whose title has sold more than 1.5 million print books, e-books and audio books. It was ranked No. 56 on USA Today’s top 100 best-seller list for all of 2018.

The Seattle-based giant houses 15 imprints in the U.S. under the Amazon Publishing banner, turning out everything from thrillers to romance novels to books translated from other languages. Amazon published 1,231 titles in the U.S. in 2017, up from 373 in 2009, the year it entered the $16 billion-a-year consumer book publishing business.

To promote these works, it has tools other publishers can only dream about owning, including Amazon First Reads and Kindle Unlimited, Amazon’s e-book subscription service. Together, they reach an estimated 10 million or more customers who can read offered titles with a few keystrokes.

“They aren’t gaming the system,” literary agent Rick Pascocello said. “They own the system.”

The promotional levers that Amazon has built to lure consumers can boost the opportunities of little-known writers and recharge the careers of experienced authors such as Mr. Sullivan. Amazon Publishing, the company’s book-publishing unit, together with its self-published authors, has made it a fierce competitor in lucrative genres including romance.

To some in the industry, it is an inherently conflicted structure, in which the most powerful retailer has a competing incentive to favor books it publishes and those from authors using its self-publishing technology.

On Wednesday, 16 of the top 20 books on Amazon’s romance best-seller list were titles from its book-publishing arm or were self-published on Amazon’s platform.

Amazon said its marketing and retail programs don’t give its books an unfair advantage, and that it offers all publishers a chance to use them.

“Our focus is on making sure that our customers get great content,” said Jeff Belle, vice president of Amazon Publishing. “The feedback from authors, customers and agents has all been positive.”

Amazon commands some 72% of adult new book sales online, and 49% of all new book sales by units, according to book-industry research firm Codex Group LLC.

Tensions over Amazon’s role as a retailer and a producer of goods extend to other parts of its business. As the company develops more of its own private-label goods and aggressively promotes them, it faces complaints from competing merchants and brands that sell on its site.

“Amazon’s private label products are approximately 1% of our total sales,” the company said in a statement.

The tech giant, which got its start as an online bookseller in Jeff Bezos’ garage in 1994 to become the world’s largest public company, is estimated to have more than 550 million retail items of all kinds on its website, as well as data from billions of customer transactions. Amazon’s digital advertising business is the third largest, after Google and Facebook .

For authors, the company offers a huge potential audience, especially given the decline in large bricks-and-mortar bookstores. Amazon has more than 100 million Amazon Prime members world-wide, and its U.S. subscribers can pick one title from Amazon First Reads free each month. Non-Prime members pay $1.99.

The selections for January’s Amazon First Reads.

The selections for January’s Amazon First Reads.PHOTO: COURTESY OF AMAZON.COM INC.
On Jan. 2, Amazon First Reads sent an email to members about six new titles from Amazon Publishing. By early evening, those books were the top six on Amazon’s Kindle store e-book best-seller list.

The power extends to Amazon’s $9.99-a-month Kindle Unlimited e-book subscription service. The service enables subscribers to select as many as 10 e-books at a time. It had an estimated 4.6 million paid subscribers in June 2018, according to Codex. Amazon Publishing titles and Amazon’s self-published books get prominent display, industry executives said.

Kindle Unlimited gives authors a better shot at making many of Amazon’s e-book best-seller lists, which counts every title chosen by subscribers as a sale. The subscription service is open to rival book publishers.

This month, CBS Corp.’s Simon & Schuster publishing unit put approximately 80 titles on Kindle Unlimited. The publisher wants to see if the program can generate new readers for some of its established authors.

All six January Amazon First Reads selections reached the top of the Kindle e-books best-seller list on the same day they were emailed to subscribers.

All six January Amazon First Reads selections reached the top of the Kindle e-books best-seller list on the same day they were emailed to subscribers. PHOTO: COURTESY OF AMAZON.COM INC.
Amazon declined to reveal the royalty rates it pays publishers for books in Kindle Unlimited. Major publishers typically generate $7.00 in revenue from a 300-page e-book priced at $10 and sold through a typical retail website.

Romantic interest

The scale of Amazon Publishing isn’t readily apparent because many rival booksellers decline to carry Amazon Publishing titles on their shelves.

“They get enough support on their own,” said Lori Fazio, chief operating officer of R.J. Julia Booksellers in Madison, Conn., which doesn’t stock them.

Amazon operates 18 Amazon Books retail stores, including two in Manhattan.

One of the Amazon stores in Manhattan that sells its books.

One of the Amazon stores in Manhattan that sells its books. PHOTO: RICHARD B. LEVINE/ZUMA PRESS
Industry trackers say Amazon is shrinking publishing revenue in adult fiction by releasing so many low-price books from Amazon imprints and its self-published authors. Publisher revenue from adult fiction fell 16% to $4.4 billion in 2017 from 2013, the Association of American Publishers said.

“My suspicion is the cumulative impact of Amazon’s highly integrated retail and content programs is cannibalizing traditional publisher fiction sales.” said Peter Hildick-Smith, chief executive of Codex Group, the research firm.

Mr. Hildick-Smith said the decline in revenue for fiction issued by traditional publishers coincided with the Kindle e-book store’s growing share of the overall adult book market—up 43% between 2013 and 2017—to a bit more than a quarter of the total market. E-books skew heavily to fiction, and much of that increase comes from books self-published on Amazon.

Publishers that specialize in genre fiction, especially romance—a fount of publishing profits—are feeling the biggest impact.

Steven Zacharius, chief executive of Kensington Publishing, said he has reduced the number of romance titles he publishes because of the large number of competing romance titles from Amazon Publishing, as well a boom in low-price, self-published titles. “It’s affected all romance publishers,” he said.

In 2017, Harlequin, a division of HarperCollins Publishers, closed five romance lines, saying it was responding to “changes in retail landscape and readership preferences.” HarperCollins Publishers, which paid $414 million to acquire Harlequin in 2014, is a unit of The Wall Street Journal’s parent company, News Corp.

HarperCollins Publishers Chief Executive Officer Brian Murray described Amazon as a direct competitor and an “incredibly efficient distributor.”

Independent romance publisher Entangled Publishing LLC offers a small number of erotic titles on Kindle Unlimited. For many titles, the small publishing house uses the distribution arm of a larger publisher to get its books into retail stores, a distributor that doesn’t participate in Kindle Unlimited.

As a result, most Entangled books aren’t likely to reach Amazon’s list of best-selling romance titles, which favors Kindle Unlimited titles. While Amazon has opened a lot of doors for authors and publishers, said Liz Pelletier, Entangled’s chief executive, the extra boost given to Kindle Unlimited titles makes Amazon’s best-seller list less applicable for publishers that don’t participate

That matters because the list of Amazon’s top 100 best-selling books plays a critical role publicizing new titles, she said, which translates into sales.

“The limited visibility means readers are more likely to miss out on some great books from small publishers,” she said.

By the word

Self-published authors who join Amazon’s Kindle Select program give exclusive sales rights to Amazon for 90 days in exchange for special promotions. The deal gives Amazon a percentage of every sale, and buried among the titles could be an unexpected blockbuster.

For self-published authors, Kindle Select offers greater exposure at the risk of lower returns.

Under the arrangement, these titles are enrolled in Kindle Unlimited, which pays authors based on how many pages of an e-book are read. The payouts are usually around $0.004 to $0.005 a page. Authors would receive $1.20 to $1.50 on 300-page e-book priced at $10, less if readers don’t finish.

A variety of Amazon Kindles are displayed on a building at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters.

A variety of Amazon Kindles are displayed on a building at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters. PHOTO: GRANT HINDSLEY FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Romance writer Lisa Renee Jones pulled her titles out of Kindle Unlimited in 2018 after her income fell by about one-third over a few months.

“I jumped on the bandwagon, but I later regretted it because it devalued me as an author,” said Ms. Jones, whose books have been published by St. Martin’s Press’s Griffin imprint and others.

An Amazon spokesman said thousands of self-published authors in 2018 “earned more than $50,000, with more than a thousand surpassing $100,000 in royalties.” The spokesman declined to say how many self-published books using Amazon technology were published last year. “Hundreds of thousands of authors have self-published millions of book since 2007,” he said.

Some have hit it big. Laurie Ann Starkey, a certified public accountant, quit her job in 2014 to become a full-time writer. She now owns a small independent press and employs 10 people as editors, managers and social-media staff. She generated $1.15 million last year in gross revenue, she said, mostly from her own books. About 89% of her sales were from Kindle Unlimited.

Author Mark Sullivan at work this month in Bozeman. His next book is scheduled for release in 2021.

Author Mark Sullivan at work this month in Bozeman. His next book is scheduled for release in 2021. PHOTO: RYAN DORGAN FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Romance writer Inglath Cooper’s self-published novel, “Down a Country Road,” was ranked No. 52 on Amazon’s digital romance list on Jan. 15. She said Amazon has changed publishing, much like Netflix changed the movie and TV business, by making a large inventory of books immediately available to readers.

“Rather than resent the changes,” Ms. Cooper said, “I prefer to choose the opportunities available.”

Amazon Publishing helped resurrect the career of Mr. Sullivan, whose World War II novel found little traction among New York publishers. Previously, he had written more than a dozen novels, including with author James Patterson.

“My son urged me to try Amazon,” he said.

In March 2017, the influential trade publication Publishers Weekly reviewed “Beneath a Scarlet Sky,” saying Mr. Sullivan “lays on history with a trowel in this overstuffed tale of derring-do set in Italy during WWII.”

Amazon told Mr. Sullivan not to worry. “It was such a compulsive read that I knew it had the potential to be a big book,” said Danielle Marshall, editorial director of Lake Union Publishing, the Amazon Publishing imprint.

Danielle Marshall, editorial director of Amazon's Lake Union Publishing, holds a copy of Mark Sullivan’s latest novel at an Amazon office in Seattle.

Danielle Marshall, editorial director of Amazon's Lake Union Publishing, holds a copy of Mark Sullivan’s latest novel at an Amazon office in Seattle. PHOTO: GRANT HINDSLEY FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

After a month, Mr. Sullivan’s novel had nearly 1,300 customer reviews and an average rating of 4.86 stars in the U.S. “Die-hard readers love to tell others what to read,” he said.

The book, which was initially released in e-book, audiobook and in paperback, soon shot to No. 1 on Amazon. Editions are rolling out in 33 foreign languages. Mr. Sullivan also has sold the film and TV rights.

Mr. Sullivan said he has earned “in the seven figures.” Rather than put his next novel up for auction, he struck a deal with Amazon’s Lake Union Publishing, which is expected to publish it in 2021.

—Laura Stevens contributed to this article.

Amazon/Competitors/Walmart to enter New York City—not with a store, but an ecommerce center.docx
Walmart to enter New York City—not with a store, but an ecommerce center
Jet.com, an online startup bought by Walmart, will open a warehouse in the Bronx to expand its fast grocery delivery services
A delivery man rides his bike in the rain to deliver food in New York...

A delivery man rides his bike in the rain to deliver food in New York in November 2014. Jet.com, an online startup bought by Walmart Inc. two years ago, plans to expand into faster grocery delivery services in New York. PHOTO: JEWEL SAMAD/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
By Sarah Nassauer, Wall Street Journal, 10 July 2018

Walmart Inc. WMT -0.21% plans to open a location in New York City after more than a decade of attempts, but it won’t be a Walmart store.

Instead, the retail behemoth’s foray into the Big Apple will be an ecommerce fulfillment center in the Bronx leased by Jet.com, the online startup Walmart bought two years ago.

Jet.com plans to open the center this fall to help it expand into faster same- and next-day grocery deliveries in New York City, executives said.

“This is another building block that is part of Jet’s strategy focused on urban centers,” Simon Belsham, president of Jet.com, said in an interview Monday.

Since Walmart purchased the Hoboken, N.J., startup and placed its founder Marc Lore at the head of its U.S. ecommerce business, Jet has narrowed its focus to wealthier, urban customers, often in areas where Walmart has few or no stores.

In New York, Jet will enter a crowded market for fast grocery delivery—including from Amazon.com Inc., which offers one- and two-hour delivery of some food and general merchandise through its Prime Now service. It also owns Whole Foods, which has stores in the city.

FreshDirect began delivering groceries in New York more than a decade ago, but the internet grocer added a service in 2016 that offers faster, same-day food delivery.

Jet hopes to compete by promising to deliver both food and merchandise like Apple iPhones to shoppers in tight, scheduled windows, Mr. Belsham said. “The control element, I think, is as important as speed” to online shoppers awaiting deliveries, he said.

Previously, Jet delivered groceries to New York and other Northeastern cities, but generally in two days via parcel services like FedEx Corp.

The company hasn’t yet decided on the delivery window or pricing for the service, Mr. Belsham said, but to start it will only handle Jet deliveries, not Walmart orders.

Walmart has long sought to open a store in New York but previously faced resistance from unions and labor activists when crafting store plans. It gained its first retail presence last June when it acquired online apparel startup Bonobos, which operated several showrooms in the city.

Walmart has said it plans to offer same-day grocery delivery from its U.S. stores in 100 cities by the end of the year.

© Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

Copy created under fair use guidelines for education.

Amazon/Competitors/A year after Amazon devoured Whole Foods, rivals are pursuing countermoves.docx
A year after Amazon devoured Whole Foods, rivals are pursuing countermoves
Food retailers, manufacturers and other suppliers have begun to make fundamental changes to their selling strategies
By Heather Haddon, Wall Street Journal, 10 June 2018

After buying Whole Foods last year, Amazon.com has introduced delivery and pickup options at the...