First shoes, now diapers. Amazon is reportedly about to announce on Monday the acquisition of Quidsi, the New Jersey-based ecommerce company behind Diapers.com, Soap.com, and, most recently, BeautyBar.com. Fortune’s Dan Primack, who broke the story from a maternity ward in Boston where his daughter was just born (no joke), puts the price of the all-cash deal at $540 million. A year ago, Amazon bought online shoe retailer Zappos for $1.2 billion.
Founded by Vinit Bharara and Marc Lore, Quidsi has raised a total of $78.5 million. Its most recent funding was a $20 million debt round last April from investors including Accel, Besssemer, MentorTech, and New Enterprise Associates.
Diapers.com is the company’s flagship brand, with an estimated $300-million revenue run rate this year. Soap.com just launched in June, and BeautyBar.com launched last week. So the vast majority of revenues is still coming from Diapers.com, which would value the deal at less than 2X revenues. Feeling threatened, Amazon recently started undercutting Diapers.com on price, a strategy which may have helped convince them to sell.
If the deal goes through, it would just go to show that you can still build an ecommerce startup if you go after the right niche. But it would also prove that if you get big enough, Amazon will notice and either buy you or try to squash you.
Amazon has just released a new free iPad app, called Amazon Windowshop that the company says is a complete “rewrite” of Amazon.com specifically for the iPad. Optimized for touch screen tablets, Amazon Windowshop makes it easy to swipe through the store to browse products on the iPad.
Similar to Amazon’s website, the app features product lists including “Featured”, “Bestsellers”, “Recommendations”, “New Releases”, “Most Wished For”, “Most Gifted”, and “Movers & Shakers”.
Amazon presents products via a grid-like interface, but will include pop-outs of specific products with high-resolution images, user reviews, descriptions and videos related to that product (which includes 30 second samples for the music items).
For Amazon Prime members, the app will indicate which products qualify for Amazon Prime and include Amazon 1-Click checkout. You can also share products from the app via e-mail, Facebook, or Twitter, save an item for later by adding it to your Wish List, and more.
Essentially the app is a suped up version of Amazon.com that is designed specifically for the iPad. It almost feels like a catalog, because of the layout and images. As the holiday season draws near, Amazon is undoubtedly ramping up its online shopping offerings, and capitalizing on the continued growth in the the consumer use of the iPad.
When it comes to buying music online, there’s iTunes, which is ahead by a mile, and then there’s everyone else. According to a recent report published by Billboard, iTunes accounts for 26.7% of US music sales, making it the top ranked music vendor in the United States, including physical retailers like Walmart and Best Buy. Amazon accounts for a respectable 7.1% of the market, but its digital download service — which competes directly with iTunes — only represents a meager 1.3% share (the rest is from physical CD sales). But we’re hearing Amazon is looking to turn things around.
We’re hearing from one source that Amazon is aiming for a major Q1 relaunch of the MP3 Store’s APIs and web services. They’re asking partners that are building out or planning to launch Amazon MP3 integrations to hold off until this new release is baked, we’ve heard.
Another piece of evidence: Amazon is actively hiring for the MP3 Store team. The MP3 Store’s Twitter account has just tweeted a page with over a dozen job openings for both business and engineering positions, including spots for a Web Applications Manager, Client Application Developer, and engineers dedicated to mobile apps for both Android and other partners (some of these openings were listed in the last five months, while others are apparently brand new).
Amazon’s MP3 store has been available in a public beta since September 2007, and made waves in 2008 by becoming the first online music vendor to sell songs without DRM (iTunes eventually followed). It comes pre-installed on Android phones as a native application (which works quite well), but its desktop website has a pretty poor user experience compared to iTunes. Look for Amazon to try to get its store integrated in as many places as possible later this year and early next year — given its past association with Android, it’s even possible that Amazon may be involved with the Google iTunes Competitor that was previewed at Google I/O.
The Archos 7 Home Tablet already went up for pre-order overseas last month, but it's now finally available to order over here as well courtesy of Amazon, with more retailers undoubtedly set to follow soon. While there's still no word on an exact release date (Archos has only said the "end of April"), the 7-inch tablet can now be ordered for $199.99, which is one of the more inexpensive ways to get a taste of Android without having to sign a contract. Still not sure what you might be getting into? Then be sure to check out our hands-on for a quick overview of the device.
[Thanks, Ron]
Archos 7 Home Tablet up for pre-order on Amazon for $199 originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 22 Apr 2010 01:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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