Buy.com vs Amazon - Which is better?

Buy.com, one of the most popular multi-channel online retailers in the United States, offers a diverse range of products including software, books, movies, music, games, toys, digital cameras, cellular phones, CDs, electronics and software and magazines. Buy.com made a grand foray into the online market place by selling products below cost. Today, its products are competitively priced and the website surely has an incredible edge over its online counterparts. The company distributes the BuyMagazine; a monthly digital publication focussing on product reviews, to an amazing 3.5 million customers. The website provides extensive information on all kinds of products through reviews and blogs. Customers can also check out the products from the most popular brands across the globe. Grab some of the best products at Hot Deals, for clearance prices!

Amazon.com, Inc. is a well-known name in global online retailing. An American electronic commerce company launched by Jeff Bezos in 1995, Amazon.com hosts an exceptional array of products ranging from books, DVDs, music CDs and computer software to apparel, furniture, food and toys. As part of its expansion, the company provides retail sales of music CDs, videotapes and DVDs, software, consumer electronics, kitchen items, tools, lawn and garden items, toys & games, baby products, apparel, sporting goods, gourmet food, jewellery, watches, health and personal-care items, beauty products, musical instruments, industrial & scientific supplies, groceries and more.

Amazon.com hosts certain highly popular and unique features. The users are allowed to submit their reviews on each product on a rating scale from one to five stars. These rating scales are highly significant as they provide an idea of the popularity and reliability of a product. The website makes about 40% of its sales from affiliates or Associates. A few years back, Amazon launched the incredible Amazon Visa Card which enabled its customers to conveniently do online shopping at the website. This highly innovative process has been closely followed by other websites such as Buy.com, Overstock.com, United.com, and aol.com.

Search Inside the Book is yet another striking feature which allows customers to search for keywords in the full text of millions of books. Today, there are about 250,000 books in the program. Amazon has collaborated with around 130 publishers to enable users to perform these searches. As a stringent security measure to avoid copyright violations, Amazon.com does not return the computer-readable text of the book but rather a picture of the page containing the specific excerpt, disables printing of the pages, and has put a restriction on the number of pages a single user can access in a book

Another specialty of the website is its wiki feature in their product database, which helps any customer who had bought at least one item, to edit a section of each product page. Amazon Prime is a service, available at $79 per year, which helps customers avail free two day shipping and upgraded overnight shipping for $3.99 on all eligible products. Quite recently, the company launched Amazon Connect, by which authors can post their remarks at the bottom of the detail pages of their books and on the Amazon home page of those who have purchased their books.

Nayanathara S.

Hi-Tech Editorial Division