Saturday, November 04, 2006

Does Amazon's Business Model Include Scanbuy?

While I am not a big believer in physical world connection being used as a price comparison application, I do believe PWC will get adopted quicker when it is used as a tool instead of an advertising vehicle.

From Business Week Jeff Bezos' Risky Bet


In 2002, Amazon began offering outside software and Web site developers access to selected Amazon data such as pricing trends, gradually adding more and more until this year. Now it's basically getting free help from more than 200,000 outside Web developers, up 60% from a year ago.
They're building new services on top of Amazon technology, further feeding back into Amazon's core retail business.

One service, Scanbuy , lets people check Amazon prices on their cell phones to see if they're better than prices in a retail store.

One thing to keep in mind, the CEO of Scanbuy was the former CEO of Barnes and Noble. He has seen the initial transformation of bricks and mortar to ecommerce.
He knows the potential of physical world connection and Phase 2 of the Net.

I see Amazon utilizing Scanbuy's barcode tool to drive traffic to Amazon's site. Instead of a price comparison service, Amazon could just guarantee the lowest price on any product with a barcode.

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