At an event yesterday where the company unveiled a range of new Echo smart speakers and other Alexa-enabled devices, the company announced a new way to easily set up internet of things (IoT) devices. The Verge reports: Called Wi-Fi Simple Setup, the system will use Amazon's Wi-Fi Lockers to store your Wi-Fi credentials and share them with compatible smart home devices. Amazon is debuting this tech with TP-Link and Eero, with the idea that customers can reuse network credentials in order to set up new devices. This means devices will connect on their own instead of you having to manually set up each smart product. According to Amazon, it's as easy as plugging in a Wi-Fi Simple Setup-enabled device. The device will automatically look for the Wi-Fi Simple Setup Network and connect once it receives encrypted credentials. Amazon says the process should take no longer than 30 seconds. The ecommerce company also announced a "plug-and-play smart home kit called Alexa Connect Kit. "It starts with a module that has Bluetooth LE and Wi-Fi and a real-time OS that companies can put in their products in order to make them smart," reports The Verge.

Chinese e-commerce company JD.com plans to expand in Europe and aims to have finalized its strategy for entering the market by the end of the year, its chief executive told a German newspaper. Reuters: China's second largest e-commerce business also wants to open an office in Germany by the end of 2018, the Handelsblatt daily cited Richard Liu as saying. "For me it's no longer just about selling products from Germany in China. I would also like to sell products in Europe," Liu told the paper. "We have just got to clarify the details." Further reading: JD.com is expanding its consumer base with drone delivery and local recruits who can exploit villages' tight-knit social networks to drum up business.

Amazon's Prime Day shopping spree offers free, fast shipping -- but experts say there's a hidden environmental cost that doesn't show up on the checkout page. From a report: Expedited shipping means your packages may not be as consolidated as they could be, leading to more cars and trucks required to deliver them, and an increase in packaging waste, which researchers have found is adding more congestion to our cities, pollutants to our air, and cardboard to our landfills. Free and fast shipping has always been a Prime membership's marquee perk -- one that's drawn in over 100 million subscribers who pay $119 annually. A 2017 study by UPS found that nearly all (96%) US customers had made a purchase on a marketplace like Amazon or Walmart, and over half (55%) said free or discounted shipping was the primary reason.

[...] That convenience is encouraging people in the US to buy more, and to make more individual purchases rather than placing a single order for several items. "There are more sales in lower-price products online than there have been in stores," Marshal Cohen, chief industry advisor at the NPD Group, told BuzzFeed News. And all of those transactions are negatively impacting our planet, according to Miguel Jaller, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Davis: "People are consuming more. There's more demand created by the availability of these cheap products and cheap delivery options."

A week after a report claimed that Amazon Web Services was building its own bare-bones networking switch in a potential threat to networking giant companies, Cisco says it has checked with Amazon, with which it has long maintained a relationship, and it has been assured by the ecommerce giant that is not entering its territory. From a report: AWS CEO Andy Jassy and Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins had a "recent call" from which Robbins walked away satisfied that AWS wasn't "actively building a commercial network switch," Marketwatch reported Wednesday, citing a statement from Cisco that it confirmed as authentic with AWS. That follows a report last week from The Information that AWS was working on a so-called "white-box switch," which the site portrayed as a frontal assault on Cisco that sent networking stocks slumping on a lazy summer Friday afternoon.

New numbers from researchers at eMarketer reveal that Amazon is set to clear $258.22 billion in U.S. retail sales in 2018, "which will work out to 49.1 percent of all online retail spend in the country, and 5 percent of all retail sales," reports TechCrunch. From the report: It started as an online bookstore, but today Amazon is a behemoth in all areas of e-commerce, fueled by a strong Marketplace network of third-party sellers, an ever-expanding range of goods from groceries to fashion, and a very popular loyalty program in the form of Prime. Now, it is fast approaching a tipping point where more people will be spending money with Amazon, than with all other retailers -- combined. Amazon's next-closest competitor, eBay, a very, very distant second at 6.6 percent, and Apple in third at 3.9 percent. Walmart, the world's biggest retailer when counting physical stores, has yet to really hit the right note in e-commerce and comes in behind Apple with 3.7 percent of online sales in the U.S. The report goes on to mention that Amazon's pace has not slowed down. "Its sales are up 29.2 percent versus a year ago, when it commanded 43 percent of all e-commerce retail sales," reports TechCrunch. These new numbers may renew the prospect of antitrust action being brought against the online giant.

Vindu Goel, writing for The New York Times: Perched high in the Himalayas, near India's border with China, the tiny town of Leh sometimes seems as if it has been left behind by modern technology. Internet and cellphone service is spotty, the two roads to the outside world are snowed in every winter, and Buddhist monasteries compete with military outposts for prime mountaintop locations. But early each morning, the convenience of the digital age arrives, by way of a plane carrying 15 to 20 bags of packages from Amazon. At an elevation of 11,562 feet, Leh is the highest spot in the world where the company offers speedy delivery.

When the plane arrives from New Delhi, it is met by employees from Amazon's local delivery partner, Incredible Himalaya, who then shuttle the packages by van to a modest warehouse nearby. Eshay Rangdol, 26, the nephew of the owner, helps oversee the sorting of the packages and delivers many of them himself. The couriers must follow exacting standards set by Amazon, from wearing closed-toe shoes and being neatly groomed to displaying their ID cards and carrying a fully charged cellphone. Amazon began offering doorstep delivery in this region last fall, as part of an effort to better serve the remotest corners of India. Sales volume in Leh is up twelvefold since Incredible Himalaya took over deliveries from the postal service, which was much slower and required customers to pick up packages at the post office.

Amazon -- which for years has maintained the standard for free returns online -- might now ban users for making too many returns. From a report:The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday documented complaints that the e-commerce giant had barred customers who had returned items. Amazon apparently failed to alert the customers that they had returned too many items before the bans. The Journal spoke with two people and cited dozens more online who said they had been barred from Amazon, as well as others who received emails from the company after returning some items. The two people who spoke with The Journal seem to be part of a wave of hundreds of people who were barred from Amazon in late March and early April, as previously reported by Business Insider.

Here's an interesting development about to take place in India. From a report: Walmart Inc. has decided to go all in on its deal to acquire Flipkart in a deal sealed on Thursday to buy 73% of the Indian ecommerce company in one of the biggest mergers and acquisitions in the country -- spending at least $14.6 billion in the cash-and-stock buyout. One source said Flipkart was valued at $20 billion, while two others said Walmart, the world's largest retailer, had put the target company's value at as much as $22 billion, a price at which it will spend more than $16 billion. Alphabet Inc., the parent company of search giant Google, is said to be participating in the deal with a $3 billion investment. Kalyan Krishnamurthy will stay on as chief executive of Flipkart.

President Trump escalated his attack on Amazon on Thursday, saying that the e-commerce giant does not pay enough taxes, and strongly suggested that he may try to rein in the e-commerce business. From a report: The president took aim at Amazon's tax contributions, its use of the US Postal Service and practices that put "many thousands of retailers out of business!" The accusations aren't new. The tweet was likely prompted by an Axios story on Wednesday that claimed Trump was weighing "going after" Amazon over alleged antitrust activities or violations of competition laws. The Axios story appeared to contribute to a selloff of Amazon stock Wednesday, with Amazon shares dropping 4.4 percent, even though Trump's disdain for Amazon and its CEO, Jeff Bezos, was already well-known. Bezos owns The Washington Post, whose coverage has been less than glowing about the new president, which may be a factor in Trump's attacks. Trump's tweet, in full: I have stated my concerns with Amazon long before the Election. Unlike others, they pay little or no taxes to state & local governments, use our Postal System as their Delivery Boy (causing tremendous loss to the U.S.), and are putting many thousands of retailers out of business!

hackingbear writes: Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba has announced that its mobile wallet app Alipay is to be accepted in physical Apple Stores in the country. This would be the first time Apple has allowed retail store purchases to be made with a third-party mobile wallet app amid a push by the iPhone maker to revive growth in the world's No.2 economy. Apple has had to work hard to promote Apple Pay in China due to the popularity of existing, local mobile wallet apps like WeChat Pat and Alipay. The company had already bowed to the inevitable in allowing local apps to be used for online payments. Other American brands like McDonald's and Starbucks have already started accepting Alipay and WeChat Pay in China for sometimes.

Have you noticed that your tiniest ecommerce items, which used to be shipped in a box, are now arriving in a padded envelope? WSJ reports: Amazon is trying to ship each order in one correctly sized package instead of multiple boxes, responding to rising shipping costs and consumers' concern about the environmental impact (Editor's note: the link may be paywalled) and general nuisance of all that cardboard. That means adding bubble envelopes, tweaking algorithms and negotiating with manufacturers to make smaller packaging specifically for online sales, not store shelves. [...] This year, Amazon added machines in its warehouses that create padded mailers on demand to fit smaller items, all of which used to go into the company's smallest-sized box. Almost half of all of Amazon's products fit into the new mailers and poly bags, says Kim Houchens, director of customer packaging experience. Her team has been working to improve algorithms that help decide which size box and how many items should be packed together in each shipment. The algorithms use machine learning to test out new combinations -- for example, shipping a breakable item in a smaller box with less cushioning. The algorithm can scan customer reviews and other data to see if it worked and adjust as needed.

Ina Fried, reporting for Axios: Amazon confirmed Thursday that it will again sell the Apple TV set-top box and Google Chromecast dongle. The company had stopped selling the devices amid disputes with both giants. There's a lot of frenemy stuff at play here, with Google, Apple and Amazon all selling their own streaming devices, but also looking to offer their own services on one another's devices. Apple doesn't offer its programing on rival devices, but does move a lot of hardware through Amazon.

China enacted sweeping changes to a business competition law to address fraud in the e-commerce industry, which is plagued by malfeasance ranging from fake positive reviews to merchants goosing sales numbers. From a report: The National People's Congress adopted revisions Saturday to the Anti-Unfair Competition Law intended to address online retailers, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. The changes take effect Jan. 1 but were announced days before Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.'s Nov. 11 Singles' Day bargain extravaganza, which dwarfs Black Friday in the U.S. in terms of revenue. The Chinese law initially took effect in 1993 as a way to protect consumers and businesses from unfair market practices. At that time, none of China's biggest online companies -- including Alibaba, Tencent Holdings Ltd., Baidu Inc. and JD.com Inc. -- even existed. As e-commerce developed and prospered, attendant problems grew with it. These latest revisions stipulate that operators shouldn't deceive consumers by faking sales or employing "click farms" to rack up positive product reviews -- increasingly common practices that have drawn the ire of buyers. And the rules encompass the entire breadth of internet commerce, from online goods and movie ticketing to food delivery.

Ecommerce giant eBay has launched a previously announced service designed to combat the scourge of fake goods on the platform. From a report: eBay has proven popular with fake goods' sellers for some time, with fashion accessories and jewelry featuring highly on counterfeiters' agenda. The company announced eBay Authenticate way back in January with a broad focus on giving "high-end" goods an official stamp of approval prior to sale. Ultimately designed to encourage buyers to part with cash on expensive items, it uses a network of professional authenticators who take physical receipt of a seller's products, validates them, and then photographs, lists, and ships the goods to the successful buyer. For today's launch of eBay Authenticate, the service is only available for luxury handbags from 12 brands, including Chanel, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Prada, and Valentino, though the program will be expanded to cover other luxury goods and brands from next year. "With tens-of-thousands of high-end handbags currently available, eBay is primed to boost customer confidence in selling and shopping for an amazing selection of designer merchandise," noted Laura Chambers, vice president of consumer selling at eBay. "We also believe our sellers will love this service, as it provides them with a white-glove service when selling luxury handbags."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon, disrupter of industries from book selling to grocery shopping, has found its latest sector to upend -- recruiting at the nation's elite business schools. The Seattle-based retail giant is now the top recruiter at the business schools of Carnegie Mellon University, Duke University and University of California, Berkeley. It is the biggest internship destination for first-year M.B.A.s at the University of Michigan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dartmouth College and Duke. Amazon took in more interns from the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business than either Bain & Co. or McKinsey & Co., which were until recently among the school's top hirers of interns, according to Madhav Rajan, Booth's dean. All told, Amazon has hired some 1,000 M.B.A.s in the past year, according to Miriam Park, Amazon's director of university programs -- a drop in the bucket for a company that plans to add 50,000 software developers in the next year. But Amazon's flood-the-zone approach to recruiting and hiring future M.B.A.s -- in some cases before they have taken a single business-school course -- is feeding the career frenzy on campus and rankling some rival recruiters. The talent wars begin even before classes do. This past June, Amazon sponsored an event at its Seattle headquarters for 650 soon-to-be first-year and returning women M.B.A. students, some of whom left the event with internship offers for summer 2018.

Willium Caput, a researcher for the firm Evolve Security, examined a stack of gift cards he obtained from a major Mexican restaurant chain and noticed a pattern: aside from the final four digits of the cards that appeared to be random, the rest remained constant except one digit that appeared to increase by one with every card he examined. Andy Greenberg explains how Caput plans to defraud the system in his report via WIRED (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source): "You take a small sample of gift cards from restaurants, department stores, movie theaters, even airlines, look at the pattern, determine the other cards that have been sold to customers and steal the value on them," says Caput. To pull off the trick, Caput says he has to obtain at least one of the target company's gift cards. Unactivated cards often sit out for the taking at restaurants and retailers, or he can just buy one. (Not all cards change by a value of one, as that first Mexican restaurant did. But Caput says obtaining two or three cards can help to determine the patterns of those that don't.) Then he simply visits the web page that the store or restaurant uses for checking a card's value. From there, he runs the bruteforcing software Burp Intruder to cycle through all 10,000 possible values for the four random digits at the end of the card's number, a process that takes about 10 minutes. By repeating the process and incrementing the other, predictable numbers, the site will confirm exactly which cards have how much value. "If you can find just one of their gift cards or vouchers, you can bruteforce the website," he says.

Once a thief has determined those activated, value-holding card numbers, he or she can use them on the retailer's ecommerce page, or even in person; Caput's written them to a blank plastic card with a $120 magnetic-strip writing device available on Amazon, and found that most retailers accept his cards without questions. (Caput only asks the store or restaurant to check the card's balance, rather than spend any money from the cards belonging to actual victims.) "It's a pretty anonymous attack," Caput says. "I can go in, order food, and walk out. The person's card says it has $50 on it, and then it's gone." Caput said he plans to present his findings at the Toorcon hacker conference this weekend.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A Charlotte-based startup says e-commerce king Amazon jacked up their suggested retail price during the company's annual discount event -- Prime Day -- to deceive consumers into thinking that they were getting a deal, when in reality, they weren't. Jason Jacobs, founder of Remodeez, a small company that specializes in non-toxic foot deodorizers and other odor stoppers, says he had an agreement with Amazon since 2015 on a suggested retail price of $9.99 for his products and was shocked after the tech giant almost doubled that on Prime Day to make it look like people were getting a discount, when they were actually paying full price. "They showed the product at $15.42 and then exed it out to put '$9.99 for Amazon Prime Day.' And on the final day, the price was like $18.44. So, we put a support ticket in right away and I rallied some friends through social media to go to their complaint board and complain," Jacobs tells FOX Business.

"Millionaire" online businesses selling on ecommerce site Ebay have jumped 50 percent in key international markets Britain and Germany in the last four years, despite currency swings that have slowed growth outside the United States. From a report: Fresh data published on Tuesday by Ebay shows the number of million euro businesses selling on Ebay grew to 1,095 from 731 in Germany last year since 2013 while million pound-plus businesses rose to 663 from 443 in Britain over the same time period. Ebay's two big European markets were collectively responsible for 30 percent of Ebay's total net revenue of nearly $9 billion last year, although reported revenue in both markets dipped amid currency declines against the U.S. dollar. Two examples in the north of England are MusicMagpie.co.uk, which buys used CDs, DVDs and electronics from consumers for resale on Ebay in more than 140 countries, and cycling accessory seller MaxGear, now a 3.5 million pound ($4.51 million) a year business. While the company founded 22 years ago started out as an online auction site for consumers to trade second-hand goods, 80 percent of merchandise now sold via Ebay is new, largely fixed-price items, the company reported in the first quarter of 2017.

An anonymous reader shares a press release: This week, O'Reilly Media stopped retailing books directly on our ecommerce store. You might say "what!?" Or you might say "what's the big deal?" Before I explain our business strategy here, there are two important things to note: We are absolutely continuing to publish the top-quality books that are important to the communities we serve.
1. We still sell them through Amazon or your favorite retailer.
2. So why the change? It's clear that we're in the midst of a fundamental shift in how people get and use their content.
Subscription services like Spotify and Netflix are the new norm, as people opt for paying for digital access rather than purchasing physical units one by one. We've already seen this in our own business -- the growth of membership on Safari far exceeds the individual units previously purchased on oreilly.com. That's one reason for the change.

Etsy, the online market for artisan and handmade goods, said on Wednesday that it will reduce its workforce by 15 per cent on top of another round of job cuts announced last month. From a report: CEO Josh Silverman announced this morning that Etsy was laying off 15 percent of its workforce. That's in addition to layoffs that were announced in early May; the total workforce reduction comes in at 22 percent, or about 230 employees. Silverman said the layoffs were part of an effort to focus on Etsy's "vital few initiatives," though he didn't specify exactly what parts of the company were being a drag. The only indication was that the company would focus on its "core marketplace."