Buy.com makes another move to lure Amazon customers
Following an announcement last week to drop shipping charges on nearly all of its 1 million products, Buy.com is upping the stakes again, announcing today that it will discount all books 10% below Amazon.com prices. This is the company’s second move--along with free shipping--to attract some of the 25 million Amazon.com customers who buy books, says Robert Price, president and CFO.
Buy.com has 5 million customers and Price says the company is looking to lure as many as possible away from Amazon. "Books are clearly an area where a lot of Amazon.com customers focus," he says. "Our catalog has more than a million titles and historically our pricing has been better than Amazon’s. It was time to actually announce it." Price says he analyzed Amazon’s top 100 book prices and found that 84 of Buy’s titles were already priced lower than its chief rival. "It’s going to cause us to adjust pricing but only on less than 20% of our title base," he says.
Buy.com is marketing the 10% book discount in newspaper ads, such as in the Wall Street Journal, in weekly newspaper inserts in 10 markets, and through 40,000 affiliate sites that drive traffic to Buy.com, says Price. The company also is sending e-mails to roughly 3 million of its customer base that have opted to receive messages.
So far the impact of its new free shipping policy is helping business, he says. The number of orders have increased 30% and the dollar amount per order has increased more than 20%, according to Price. "We’re more than making up for the cost of the free shipping offer," says Price. Buy.com is considering other categories for upcoming announcements, although Price did not elaborate.
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