Your Tech Story

Amazon

Amazon Marks Record-breaking Holiday Season Sale; Ships Over 1 Billion Items in the U.S.

News, Tech News / By
amazon
Image Source: yahoo.com

Christmas just went by and the year is about to end. After the huge festive sales and the big black Friday sale, people were excited about the Christmas shopping. According to Amazon, on Christmas too, people enjoyed lots of discounts, and with the Amazon’s Prime membership, they shipped their gifts for free. This time again, Amazon has recorded huge sales on almost everything.

Reportedly, in the last week, Amazon has shipped more than a billion items only in the US for free, that has even broken its own old records of sales. Both the Prime as well as the Trial members ordered more items than ever in this holiday season.

Though Amazon’s last earnings had disappointed its investors, the holiday season sale may help it regain the profits. The company has not disclosed the revenue it made in the sales, but still, has confirmed that it had the biggest sale ever. The company had a record-breaking business, and it registered tens of millions of people for its Trial as well as Prime memberships.

The company not only marked the sales of clothes, household items but had the most expensive branded things as its best sellers of the sellout, including the Echo, Echo Dot and Fire TV Stick 4K. It also sold the smart home devices such as Amazon Smart Plug, Ring Video Doorbell 2 and the iRobot Roomba 690.

Amazon’s CEO of its worldwide consumer business, Jeff Wilke, said that “We are thrilled that in the U.S. alone, more than one billion items shipped for free this holiday with Prime. This season was our best yet, and we look forward to continuing to bring our customers what they want, in ways most convenient for them in 2019″.

This time, Alexa became the favourite of many, and most of the people shopped using the Alexa app in the U.S. The shopping through the app got tripled this time as compared to the past year. The sale not only earned profits for the tech giant, but also the smaller businesses trading on Amazon, marked up to 50 per cent of profits.

Amazon Opens its First Pint-sized Cashier-free Amazon Go Store in Seattle

News, Tech News / By

There is nothing, which the biggest retailer, Amazon, does not want to try its hands in. After building the largest empire of online business, Amazon has also entered into the bricks-and-mortar world, with its large Amazon Go cashier-less stores, operating successfully in Chicago, San Francisco and Seattle.

amazongo
Image source: pymnts.com

This time, Amazon has launched the tiny version of its Amazon Go stores in Seattle- the eighth cashier-less store. The store is located on the sixth floor of the Macy’s building in downtown, Seattle. It is this first store of the chain of small stores, Amazon intends to launch for airports, office lobbies, and hospitals. This tiny store is quarter the size of the other big Amazon stores, almost about the size of a 450-square-foot New York City studio apartment.

Unlike the other Amazon Go stores, the small store does not have any checkout lanes. The buyers need to scan an in-app code, through the Amazon Go app, on the entrance of the store, and the cameras will take care of whatever they pick from the shelves. As the store is also a cashier-less one, for the checkouts, the customers will make the payments through their Amazon accounts.

The store is isolated with glass walls and an enclosed ceiling, with all the cameras and sensors attached to it. Amazon has built those stores, especially for its employees. The stores contain a wider variety of pre-made food, grocery, salads and snacks, etc., so that the customers can buy the items on the go.

Gianna Puerini, vice president of Amazon Go, said, “We wanted something from a design perspective that would fit nicely into open spaces. You can bring it in pieces and assemble it on site.”

There were news making rounds, in September this year, that Amazon is planning to build over 3000 such stores across the world. However, there has been no confirmation on the topic from the company.

Amazon Gets into Blockchain Business; Launches Two New Products

News, Tech News / By

Last year, Amazon was planning for its debut in the blockchain industry with Amazon Web Services (AWS), but due to some reasons, could not come to any conclusions. But, finally, despite the huge plunge that crypto had faced this year, Amazon has launched two of its new products based on the same technology, at the Amazon’s re:Invent conference, held on Wednesday in Las Vegas.

blockchain
Image Source: medium.com

One of the two blockchain platforms that Amazon introduced is the Amazon Managed Blockchain. The platform is specially built for the blockchain developers. It helps them develop blockchain networks without having to create their own blockchain platform. The platform supports the two popular existing blockchain platforms — Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric. Right now, the platform is not available for Ethereum.

“Amazon Managed Blockchain is a fully managed service that allows you to set up and manage a scalable blockchain network with just a few clicks,” Amazon said in an announcement.

The other blockchain based product that Amazon announced at the event is the Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB), that is a type of log of transactions, which is transparent, stable, and cryptographically verifiable. A central trusted authority will supervise the ledger. The users can replicate a copy of their blockchain activities with the help of this platform.

“Managed Blockchain can replicate an immutable copy of your blockchain network activity into Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB), a fully managed ledger database. This allows you to easily analyze the network activity outside the network and gain insights into trends,” company website mentioned.

Amazon’s cloud chief Andy Jassy, took three hours to explain about Amazon’s two products as well as talked about its competitors and their products. “We don’t build things for optics,” he said, “AWS only spends resources on something when they understand the problem. This is something that a lot of companies need,” he added.

The availability terms for most of the services announced at the event are still under the wraps, and most of them are going to be more useful for the IT professionals, rather than the business managers. The blockchain services provided by Amazon are open for signups, and after the verification, the users will be able to create their blockchain networks and add more members to their accounts to simulate a multi-member network.

Walmart to Replace Apple as No. 3 Online Retailer in the U.S. by the End of 2018

News, Tech News / By

According to a report released on Friday, Walmart has overtaken Apple as America’s third-largest online retailer. Last year, Apple was at the third position, after Amazon and eBay in the list of the top retailers of the U.S. with 3.8% share in the total online sale (2017). Due to a decrease in the sales of Apple’s smartphones and electronic devices this year, Walmart was successful in surpassing Apple and taking over its position on the list.

walmart
Image Source: pymnts.com

The eMarketers had estimated a boost in the sales of Walmart that it will have approximately 3.7% of the share in the online sales in the U.S., but as the Walmart’s online business is growing quickly, its share in the total online sales of the U.S., raised to 4 per cent. Apple managed to get only a per cent rise in its online sales from the previous year, i.e., 3.9 per cent. It is expected that the growth in the sales of Walmart would grow by 39.4 per cent, just behind the sales growth of Wayfair, that is expected to be 40.1 per cent, by the end of 2018.

The latest prediction by the eMarketers shows that by the end of the year Walmart will capture $20.91 billion online retail spending this year. Walmart, itself, had also reported its third-quarter profits with revenue of $124.9 billion, 1.4 per cent up from a year ago. The company has seen a rapid growth in its sales due to its efforts through every means.

Wallmart has adopted the right technology to ensure a better customer experience, providing them with an omnichannel platform to use all its services. The app provided by Wallmart helps in easy shopping as well as let them track their orders and locate the items in the store using digital maps. In the holiday season, it has also got rid of the $35 fees for its two-day delivery and has offered no-delivery charges for other delivery options. After Wallmart, the two-day delivery service has also been adopted by Amazon for its festive-season sales.

Walmart U.S. CEO Greg Foran said, “We can provide a much better customer experience because we are in stock of the right item, at the right time at the same time it is going to help us be much more precise.”

The tech giant, along with its online retail business, is also planning to raise outlook of its physical stores to increase up to 3 per cent share in its sales for the fiscal year 2019, targeting the same years earning up to $4.65 to $4.80 a share.

Amazon’s Fire TV Stick 4K is Cheaper & is Beating its Predecessors

News, Product, Tech News / By

After shipping the Fire TV Cube ($120) and third-generation Fire TV ($70, now discontinued), last year, Amazon has now launched a much cheaper yet outperforming 4K HDR video streaming device, named Fire TV Stick 4K. The device claims to provide better performance and costs only $50.

This time the remote of the device has got more features than the device itself, as now this tiny Alexa voice remote can control the TV with the power, volume, and mute buttons. With the remote, the user can control the TV’s current HDMI input, the attached soundbar, as well as can tune the channels, on the satellite set-top boxes.

Fire TV Stick
Image Source: timeincuk.net

The previous Fire TV devices can also be paired with the remote and can be bought separately. Also, the new Fire TV Cube will now be available in the market, with this new Alexa remote. Alexa enabled device can help the user to check the weather, control the smart lights, pull up a feed from the doorbell cam, or access Alexa’s other functionalities with a simple voice request. To use Alexa in the handsfree mode, the user just needs to pair the Fire TV stick with an Echo device.

The predecessors of the Fire TV Stick were built on the 1.5 GHz quad-core processor, that too is improved in the newly launched device, as it is powered by the 1.7 GHz quad-core processor. The high-performance device, now includes the hardware-accelerated MPEG-2 video, enabling the user to plug-in the HDHomeRun Connect TV tuner into the Wi-Fi router, and enjoy over-the-air channels from an antenna. This enables the users to watch full broadcast quality channels on their home TVs.

The Fire TV Stick 4K has got the support for both Dolby Vision and HDR10+, that its predecessors, Fire TV pendant and Fire TV Cube, lacked and supported the basic HDR10 format. The device also converts the standard dynamic videos to HDR. The device is connected to the TV with a USB port, streaming excellent picture and sound. The Fire TV Stick has got various inbuilt apps, including Netflix, Amazon Prime, and also streams the live TV services such as PlayStation Vue and Hulu. Still, the device does not have an app for Walmart’s Vudu service.

The device is the cheapest to stream the Dolby Vision, and it has provided a lot of content to the users to scroll over, keeping the business strategy clear in mind. The faster software handling and more sensitive voice command functionality of the device, at such a price, is making a huge difference with the performance as compared to the Roku and even the Apple TV. The Fire TV Stick, currently, is only available for the Amazon Prime members.

The Festive Sales Came to an End, Earning Double Profits For Flipkart & Amazon

News, Tech News / By
flipkart-amazon-sale
Image Source: theweek.in

The festive sales in India, inspired by the Singles Day event in China and the Cyber Monday in the US, have been repeated a few times now. Flipkart’s Big Billion Days Sale was the first of its kind (India), that was organised in October 2014. The five days sale of Flipkart, and the six days Amazon’s festive sale, has come to an end, and after the sales, Flipkart has claimed its 70% market share in the Indian e-commerce market, and likewise, Amazon has also recorded a huge profit in the sales. In fact, both the companies have earned double of the profits they had gained in the previous year’s sale.

The profits, that Amazon has earned in this festive sale, have registered its best-ever performance, nearly equal to the Flipkart’s Big Billion Days Sale. Although Flipkart is still in lead, Amazon’s India head Amit Agarwal reportedly said that the sale has given outstanding results, and has gained more profits, before the end of the sales. Also, it has surpassed all the expectations. He also said. “There are two specific areas, where we pay particular attention to, which is: the new customers and the reach of those customers, and Prime member sign-ups.” The sales added 80% new customers from the rural area to the Amazon customer base, and there have been new sign-ups for Amazon’s Prime Membership. According to the reports, Amazon sold 1 million Xiaomi smartphones, and also, the one plus phones worth 400 crores, in a day.

On the other hand, Flipkart has gained two times more profits than the previous year’s sales, fashion products playing the most vital role in it. It also sold 3 million smartphones on a single day and has claimed 85% shares in the smartphone market on that same day. A Flipkart spokesperson said, “Gross merchandise value (GMV) grew 80 per cent over the last year, whereas units grew by close to 2X year-on-year.” According to Flipkart, the BBDS 2018 has smashed all its previous records. It also gained almost 50% more customer base for Flipkart and welcomed 25 million visitors on its app, on one of the sale days.

Both Amazon and Flipkart had introduced EMI and other new payment options to attract more customers from the rural areas of India. And, based on the sales, one must say that both have achieved beyond the targets. Along with Amazon and Flipkart, other e-commerce sites including Shopclues, Snapdeal and Paytm Mall also organised their festive sales and has seen a surge in their profits this year.