amazon - Internet Marketing News and Blogs

Amazon has unveiled a new design for its UK site, with a new homepage and navigation system.

Amazon has launched a beta version of its much-anticipated DRM-free music download store.

The etailing giant claims it will have the world's largest collection of DRM-free music downloads, with 2m songs available from over 180,000 artists.

However, it is not yet available in the UK.

Statsaholic, the Alexa-powered traffic tool formerly known as Alexaholic, is being systematically crushed by Amazon in a move that is going to create a wave of negative PR for the online retail giant.

Earlier this month Amazon sent a legal warning that forced Alexaholic to drop the Alexa from its name. Fair enough – brands have to look after their trademarks. But now it is preventing Statsaholic from using its API at all.

This is bad news, and sends out a highly ridiculous message to current and prospective users of Amazon Web Services. The message is this: “If you are successful, we can close you down.”

Amazon's CEO wants to help you run your business, using the same technologies and operations that power Amazon.com.

In a great interview with Business Week, Jeff Bezos talks about the new services Amazon is offering to third party developers, providing computing power with its Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, and its hosted storage service, Amazon S3.

Some snippets after the jump...

Amazon is testing a new advertising programme, Clickriver, which allows businesses to place sponsored links on Amazon.com next to search results and on product detail pages.

Amazon's Clickriver Ads, which appears to be a version of Adwords, was built by A9.com, a search technologies subsidiary of Amazon.

Amazon is about to enter into competition with the likes of Yahoo! Answers and Microsoft Q&A with the launch of a new site, Askville, which allows users to have their queries answered by other community members.

The site is still at the testing stage at the moment, and participation is currently by invitation only, as well as only being available in the US and Canada.

One lost book, one disgruntled customer and a potential million dollar legal fee for Amazon - it's the latest in a series of morality tales showing how e-commerce companies can be hit where it hurts most due to bad customer experience.