Amazon’s Student App Features Marketplace Abilities
If you stretch your mind back to your college days, you may recall the painful feeling of your young life’s savings being ripped from your hands in exchange for back-breaking textbooks. When Amazon started, students’ pants began to sag with the weight of money in their pockets (or at least, they had more money for elite brands of packaged noodles). Now, Amazon has introduced an app specifically geared toward students and their back-to-school needs that is designed to save their wallets. The Amazon Student App allows students to scan the barcodes on their books and buy them directly from Amazon. Nothing earth-shattering. But, it also features a marketplace where students can sell and buy their textbooks directly from one another. That’s the new car smell your nose should be detecting.
Read about the app at zippycart.com.
Western Europe E-Commerce is Growing–Selectively
By now, the fact that e-commerce is growing has reached beyond the point of “duh.” However, Equi=Media, a digital media company based in the UK, points out that different industries seem to do better in different sectors of the world. For example, the travel industry is skyrocketing across Western Europe, while video games and DVDs are actually decreasing in their online sales. Though the article does not say it, this points directly to the need to know your market. If you are thinking about or have already gone global, where will your products be most successful?
Read the full article at equimedia.co.uk.
The Panda Update and the Need for Reader-Appeasing Content
SEOmoz writer Cyrus Shepard posted an article yesterday re-addressing an issue that, though it may have fallen out of buzzword grace, remains incredibly important: Google’s Panda Update. He walks through a few different “sins” that have put sites out of favor with Google, including burying original content, including multiple links to the same place on one page, and having no content on the page. (No content on the page? Why was the Internet even invented?!) To combat low SEO rankings, Cyrus recommends you “reduce the sins.” This means having content on your page that isn’t buried… a practice known as “thinking of your users and doing what would benefit them.”
Read the full article at seomoz.com.
