This is the opposite of the recent Levi online situation. Levi was seen as cutting out its retail partners to get to their customers directly online.

252

It's not necessarily a dot.com play, but seems like an effort to get into publishing.

241

What's really interesting is that most online retailers have forward integration, whereas this seems like a backwards integration play. Barnes & Noble already has a direct relationship with the customer and now they're trying to get further into the supply chain.

214

I don't think they can do it. In order for Buy.com to make any money off of this, their order size has to be two units per order. There's no incentive in the offer to drive the order that high.

194

It means you don't have to hand off each purchase and pray that some other guy is going to deliver it properly.

188

Hockey could be a fairly solid niche market. In many parts of the country, the selection of products is fairly scarce.

132

When you get this kind of selling off, the negativity points to the sector -e-commerce - falling out of favor.

122

My guess is that Amazon has seen the writing on the wall, ... They think they'll get slammed next week when they release their quarterly report and they're trying to cut their losses by telling the Street they're taking measures to control costs.

104