Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) is no doubt the biggest online retail company. The revenues of this company were greater than the total revenues of the next top 9 U.S. online retail companies all together, according to the reports of Statista. The company offers its customers almost everything that can be conceivable. Moreover, for its premium members, Amazon also delivers the purchased products for free.  These premium members, however, have to pay a total fee of $99 each year in order to ensure that their stuff get to them as fast as possible.

Many of the market experts are wondering as to whether Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) will continue to enjoy a leading positing in the retail industry, especially after Target (NYSE:TGT) and Walmart (NYSE:WMT) have improved their services.

According to the latest studies, Amazon is not the only low priced online retail company that is out there. Wells Fargo Securities conducted a one year long study on apparel, health, electronics, and cosmetic products that are offered online. The results showed that Walmart (NYSE:WMT) offers all these products at a better rate of 10 percent less than other online companies. Moreover, Target (NYSE:TGT) offers the same products at 5 percent lower prices than that of Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN). The report further showed that Walmart and Target are competing aggressively, and the chances are that the prices will go down even further in the coming months.

Another report released by ShopSavy showed that the prices of Walmart beat the prices of Amazon when it came to some overlapping products. Walmart offered 85 percent of Televisions and 66 percent of other electronic items at lower rates than that of Amazon, giving rise to 23 percent and 28 percent of savings.

But then again, it depends on the products that customers want at a particular period of time.  Deutsche Bank recently conducted a survey on 65 items that Amazon, Walmart, and Target offer. The results revealed that prices of those items on Amazon were 5 percent less than Walmart’s prices. Similarly, the prices were 7.9 percent lower than that of Target’s prices.

Coming to the stock prices of Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), the company, on the last trading day of December 26, 2014, started its stocks at a price of $305 and closed at a much higher price of $309.09, after hitting the highest price of $310.78. The company’s total market capitalization was recorded to be at $143.11 billion.  It is important to mention here that the stocks saw an increase of 6.06 percent on the last trading day. Comparing this increase with the current stock prices, it will not be wrong to say that the stocks are gold right now.

On the contrary, the stock prices of Walmart Stores (NYSE:WMT) rose only by 0.48 percent. The stocks opened at a price of $86.18 and closed at a price of $86.91, after hitting the highest price of $87.14. The company has a total market capitalization of $280.13 billion.

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) has been introducing its same day service gradually on so called essentials to city after city, but still one could be waiting for its ordered product for many hours. But, by introducing the one-hour delivery slots, they have ramped it up a few notches. The Google Inc.’s (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Play has an app specially dedicated to the customers on the mobile app and it is also available on the Apple Inc.’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) App Store and on the Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) Appstore.

Amazon.com, Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN) uses the term daily essentials, which means the product of daily use like cereal, batteries, paper towels, soap, toys and books and several other day to day routine items.

Dave Clark, the vice president of Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDA: AMZN) for the operation worldwide, in a press release said, “There are times when you are not able to go to the store and even more that you do not even want to go to the store” he continued “We have always felt that for a long time, Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) Prime is the deal which is the best deal in the shopping history and this is now gotten even better.”

Although this deal by Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) is subject to restriction in many parts of the country, and currently only customers in Manhattan can benefit from this service as it is only open in that city for the time now, it is expected to spread to other locations in no time. This move is a very big one from the Internet behemoth, and its battles with the local retailers have intensified. It’s true that move made by introducing the same-day deliveries was looked by the local retailers as an encroachment on their territory and this move of Prime Now will make matters worse for them.

Interestingly, this move by the Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) Prime Now is available for the most part of the day, it will start at 6.a.m. and it’s closing time is at midnight and it will run seven days a week. This one-hour delivery slot for Prime members will cost $7.99, and for that the customers probably want to order more not just one paper towel. There is also another window called two-hour delivery and this window by Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) will not cost you even a penny. This is indeed a ground-breaking service offered by Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN).

The malfunction affected hundreds of products that were sold on Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) between 7pm and 8pm on Friday. It arose due to a problem in the Repricer Express, an online tool used for automated pricing. The Register has warned that this blooper could cost thousands of pounds to the individual retailers. Customers who made these highly discounted purchase, celebrated it on social media and in response to it many of these retailers shared their sorrow.

Saying that their livelihood is at risk as smaller, family run businesses will be the one that will be the greatest prey to this malfunction. As these businesses will have to process the orders at a price of a single penny and therefore the loss they would face would be enormous. City A.M was told by Mehboob Rasool, a furniture retailer, that smaller retailers that sell on Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) have clubbed together to hire a lawyer for their case.

The retailer added that he had been charged with a fee of £5,000 from Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) after his products that were worth thousands of dollars were sold for a petty price. Another seller Judith Blackford who is the owner of the Kiddy mania said that she lost £20,000 in that one single night and called for support through Twitter. Repricer Express, apparently the main culprit in this bug, has apologized for the situation on its website.

It says that it worked with Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) to solve the problem and the CEO of the company said that they understand that the customers are unhappy and the company would try to eliminate the problem and would try to regain the confidence of their customers. Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) cancelled most of the orders that were placed when the one penny price was being charged. However there were a small number of orders that did pass through at that time.

Therefore Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) is looking into it. Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) told the business Insider that it is aware that a lot of seller posted incorrect price for a short  time  period because of the fault of a third party software they used to set prices for their products on the Amazon website. It further adds that Amazon has responded quickly to the situation and cancelled most of the orders that were placed during the malfunction and that Amazon would not charge any business for the cancelled orders. Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) is now looking into the small number of orders that were placed during the malfunctioning.

However the company has launched Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) element a new key feature which is line of every day essentials only for the prime members. The company wants to take their relationship with the prime to the next level. Elements on the other hand is a great threat to the Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) vendors which are already facing increased rivalry from the retailer themselves. Elements has started currently with only providing diapers and baby wipes and some other daily essentials.

Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) is positioning elements currently among the high end division which will allow the buyers to track the product down even to its origins, manufacturing place and the date. All of this can be done by using Amazon’s mobile app. This new product strategy is based directly on the feedback from the customers. The customers demand premium high standard products which meet their expectations and standards.

This is not Amazon’s (NASDAQ:AMZN) first target to sell products under its own label. The company also provides high quality cables and other technological and electrical accessories. The cables provided by Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) are more reliable, high tech and well functioning as compared to the other low quality cheap cables. The advantage here to Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) cables is that they are cheaper than the Apple ones.

The company also focuses more on its prime subscribers as compared to the regular customers. The purpose of this niche discrimination is that the prime subscribers spend $549million on Amazon’s (NASDAQ:AMZN) products and services against the regular non-subscribers which only spend $349millions. The company also happens to be working on its pricing strategy. According to the statistics those customers which spend less $50 in 90 days are less likely to be the prime customers.

The elements provided by the company provide some extra incentives which have the potential to lead the regular customers towards the prime. The data was collected from a conducted survey which included almost 2000 shoppers for Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN). The company is planning to further expand the elements if its diapers and baby wipes go well. According to analysts the quality is the main factor of success here for Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN).

The company is also expected to open a new area for prime shoppers that would encourage the primes to spend even more. The free shipping prime shoppers it’s an easy measure of calculation and an easy opportunity to decide whether they should go for it or not. However music listeners, video surfers and those sometimes go for exclusive shopping only for $99 per year.

But the post did quote Wedbush reporter Michael Pachter, who suggested that the service will be different from Prime and its price would be below Netflix’s current price of eight dollars per month. Furthermore Patcher says that it would be a Netflix competitor. It wouldn’t be surprising if Amazon’s advertisement including video service under cuts Netflix. Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) Prime only costs $ 99 a year that makes $ 8.25 a month.

This contains unlimited Photo storing, first-class music service, Kindle’s library and free shipping for two days on the numerous items available on Amazon.com’s (NASDAQ:AMZN) main retail site. Netflix still has the market leadership as it has more than 53M streaming subscribers whereas according to a New York Post report only 25M of Amazon’s estimated Prime subscribers use Prime video.

But Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) is able to offer the video streaming service alone at a cheaper price or absolutely free maintain its same content line up then there’s no doubt that Amazon will give a tough time to its competitors by assembling new subscribers. This would not only help  Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) to generate revenue form the advertisements but according to a New York Post report Amazon’s primary aim would be to gain new members that would be later enticed into buying the Amazon Prime membership.

This seems to be a great plan for Amazon but the problem with this plan would be that such a cheap quality video streaming might harm Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) Prime itself as it is the one of the biggest driver for  consumers to sign up for Amazon Prime. Although if a satisfactory percentage of Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) Prime’s 25 million video users base gets attracted to the broader reaching Amazon prime membership then Amazon’s cheap advertisement included video could then gain a larger number of consumers who would have otherwise stayed with $99 a year subscription.

In addition to it we can easily see that Amazon would want to target the customers who have not yet subscribed to Amazon Prime and Amazon is going to do it through their cheaper advertisement included video service but if this happens or not is something we will have to wait and see. Investors should have a close watch on the result of the new ad supported video streaming service as the Prime customers are the one who have purchased more from  Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) retail outlet than the non-Prime shoppers and therefore Investors should have an eye on it.

The company, however, saw a decrease of almost 18 percent in its stock prices during the year 2014.

Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN), for most of its existence, has delivered almost zero profits. The revenues of the company increased to $74.45 billion from a previous figure of $14.8 billion from the years 2007 – 2013. However, the profits decreased to $273 million from a previous figure of $436 million. It is important to note here that the company delivered profits in millions whereas the revenues were recorded to be in billions. The stocks of the company, on the other hand, kept on rising because the investors were not concerned about the decreasing profit margins. Due to Jeff’s strategies, the company has now become the biggest U.S. online retail company.

In 2014, however, the investors of the company turned on it when the company announced on December 1, 2014 that it would issue unsecured debts. Moody’s, a market analyst firm, changed Amazon.com’s (NASDAQ:AMZN) outlook to a negative, mainly because of a shift in investors’ sentiment. There are 2 reasons for this shift.

The first is that the growth in revenues has slowed down over the years. The growth rate was recorded to be at 40 percent during the year 2010; however, in 2012, the rate dropped to 22 percent.  The company expects a growth rate of around 16 to 20 percent for the current fiscal year.

The second reason for investor’s anger is that the company’s investments are not returning any benefits. One of its most prominent failures is the Fire phone, which has received extreme criticism.  The company took a loss of $170 million in its write down in the month of October, when the inventory of Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) piled up and the company decided to cut down the price from $200 to $0.99. The failure of Fire phone, however, does not reflect on the strategies of Jeff, for big bets come with big failures.

Coming to the current stock prices of Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN), the company, on the last trading day of December 3, 2014, started its stocks at a price of $325.73 and closed at a much reduced price of $316.50. The intraday range for company’s stocks was recorded to be from $314.36 to $326.77. As far as the market capitalization of Amazon is concerned, the figures stand at $150.94 billion.