Amazon Career Choice Program

Amazon.com posted the following message on its primary landing page this morning:
[Quote is between the two rows of asterisks]
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Dear Customers,
At Amazon, we like to pioneer, we like to invent, and we're not willing to do things the normal way if we can figure out a better way.

One area where we've seen particular success is our fulfillment center network. Sustained innovation inside our fulfillment centers has driven improved reliability, accuracy, and speed of delivery, as well as productivity and safety. Our high productivity allows us to pay our fulfillment center employees 30% more than traditional physical retail store employees while still offering customers the lowest prices. Our work on safety practices has been so effective that it's statistically safer to work in an Amazon fulfillment center than in a traditional department store.

Our bias for reinvention extends into our recruiting teams. For most of the year, our full-time fulfillment center employees can keep up with customer demand. But during the holiday gift-giving season, our peak needs temporarily double, and we employ many more people. Our seasonal recruiting program called CamperForce — where RVers combine work with camping — has been very successful and much written about in the media. And our military veteran recruiting program effectively helps vets transition into the civilian workforce. Amazon was recently named the #1 Top Military Friendly Employer by G.I. Jobs Magazine.

Those are just a few examples, and innovation doesn't stop. Today, we're announcing our newest innovation — one we're especially excited about — the Amazon Career Choice Program.

›Learn more about the Amazon Career Choice Program

Many of our fulfillment center employees will choose to build their careers at Amazon. For others, a job at Amazon might be a step towards a career in another field. We want to make it easier for employees to make that choice and pursue their aspirations. It can be difficult in this economy to have the flexibility and financial resources to teach yourself new skills. So, for people who've been with us as little as three years, we're offering to pre-pay 95% of the cost of courses such as aircraft mechanics, computer-aided design, machine tool technologies, medical lab technologies, nursing, and many other fields.

The program is unusual. Unlike traditional tuition reimbursement programs, we exclusively fund education only in areas that are well-paying and in high demand according to sources like the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and we fund those areas regardless of whether those skills are relevant to a career at Amazon.

Like many of our innovations at Amazon, the Career Choice Program is an experiment. We're excited about it and hope it will pay big dividends for some of our employees. This is one innovation that we hope other companies in this economy will copy.

Thanks for being a customer.
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This is a very intriguing and innovative program that addresses several urgent issues that are plaguing the job market and the economy. I applaud Amazon for truly thinking "outside the box" on this one, where many people who may be filling boxes for Amazon today may be studying to be skilled workers and technicians with Amazon's help in just a few years' time. And let's face it, for a huge percentage of the workforce, this is WAY BETTER than a standard college-track degree program. Tip of the hat to Jeff Bezos and company! You've done it again!

Amazon UK and the Olympics

I received the following email from amazon.co.uk this evening:

"As London 2012 approaches, customers in parts of London may be preparing to make changes to their daily routine. We wanted to let you know about the steps we've taken at Amazon to ensure that your deliveries continue uninterrupted.

"We have worked closely with our carrier network to ensure that you receive your packages on time, from the moment the torch arrives in London on 16 July until the closure of the Olympic Park on 14 September. This includes residential and commercial addresses in or around the Olympic venues. The carriers delivering your Amazon orders have all planned for any disruption that the Olympic Road Network could cause. They're using a variety of different methods to ensure your usual delivery service continues including employing more staff, bicycle routes and foot deliveries, to name but a few.

"If you'd like more information, we've created a dedicated page with all you need to know about deliveries to London and the other Olympic venues. This page will give you all the latest details about Amazon's delivery options during London 2012: http://www.amazon.co.uk/londondelivery

"We're also pleased to let you know about a new way to receive your Amazon orders. There will be 25 automated Amazon Lockers situated at convenient locations like shopping centres, high street locations and some transport links. The Amazon Locker network is growing and will continue to be available even after the Games have finished, allowing you to choose where to have your Amazon order delivered--then you can collect at a time that's best for you."

Ironically, I mentioned the Amazon Locker network in a previous post today.

PCI and the Cloud

Robert Westervelt, News Director of Cloud Security, has an excellent in-depth interview with Diana Kelley, a partner at Amherst, N.H.-based consultancy SecurityCurve on the impact of Cloud Computing on PCI compliance, discussing in part how the PCI Data Security Standards (on a three-year update/approval schedule) are struggling to keep up with fast-evolving technologies.

Things are complicated enough when SaaS providers offer gateway services for things like tokenization and encryption, but these are relatively straightforward compared to "custom payment software such as a Platform as a Service (PaaS) or Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), where the responsibilities [of the provider] change a little bit," to say the least!

I highly recommend Westervelt's succinct, insightful article.

Amazon's Same-Day Delivery Strategy

Now that Amazon has given in on the sales tax issue, it has decided that it should leverage its new "nexus" in populous states with a strategy of same-day delivery on most purchases (for a small surcharge), based on a bevvy of new state-of-the-art warehouses (using picking robots from newly acquired Kiva Systems) it is building in New Jersey, Virgnia (2),Tennessee, Texas, and California (2) costing over $500 million. Ten more states will see new Amazon warehouses in the next three years, employing 10,000 people.

For details on this and other possible Amazon delivery strategies (such as PIN-accessed lockers in drug and convenience stores), see this article in Slate.

3dCart Adds SEO, PPC

3dcart, used by tens of thousands of Internet businesses, is considered one of the most dependable eCcommerce platforms on the market.

With its latest service offering, the company now makes Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click management (PPC) available to its customers, along with a dedicated Search Engine Marketing (SEM) team. This gives 3dCart clients high-end online marketing at a fraction of the cost of major search marketing agencies. And because the 3dCart SEM team knows the many intricacies of its eCommerce platform, there is no learning curve between marketing strategies and execution.

In addition to 3dacart's new marketing solution, the 3dCart SEM team has begun a blog aimed at educating online merchants about the shopping cart's long list of SEO-friendly features. The blog is also available to the public at http://www.3dcartsem.com. Instructions on managing SEO guidelines within the shopping cart software is a primary focus. Their new blog also features an area for anyone to submit SEO questions, which are often publicly posted and answered. This is done in an effort to educate merchants on SEO and how to better optimize their own websites -- and probably to show off the expertise of the 3dCart SEO team!

3dCart's SEO benefits include a focus on categorization and meta tags for individual pages; the ability to specify keywords that best describe each page's content, which makes optimizing each item easy and efficient; and 3dcart's 301 redirect control panel allowing its users to manage the URL of every page to keep the same page URL's within a new shopping cart system.

TurnTo Joins Demandware LINK Partner Program

TurnTo Networks today announced that it has become a Demandware LINK Technology Partner, joining a community accelerating adoption of eCommerce technologies complementary to the Demandware Commerce platform.

Through the LINK Technology Partner Program, TurnTo has developed a pre-built integration between its Social Q&A Platform and Demandware Commerce, making it possible for Demandware clients to implement its Social Q&A solution in a fraction of the time normally required.

“Demandware is excited to have TurnTo as part of our LINK Technology community.  Fresh, unique content is increasingly important to successful online merchandising, as is meaningful shopper engagement.  The TurnTo solution delivers on both these goals, providing a key element in a well-rounded ecommerce strategy,” said Jamus Driscoll, Senior VP of Marketing for Demandware.

Active Outreach
TurnTo’s social approach to product Q&A enables shoppers to get their questions answered by previous purchasers of the product they are considering.  The patent-pending “active outreach” model delivers answers in under an hour, on average.

Merchants experience conversion lift of 300-900% for shoppers using the system and SEO benefits from tripling the user-generated content (UGC) produced by their customer reviews tool.

“Being able to easily add our Social Q&A system to sites built on the Demandware Commerce platform is exciting for us and great for retailers. Several Demandware clients have already experienced the ease of integration and witnessed firsthand the amount of UGC our system has generated for them on their product pages,” said Cathie O’Callaghan, TurnTo Director of Marketing.

Demandware LINK
The Demandware LINK Technology Partner Program provides Demandware clients with a rich of set of pre-built integrations to eCommerce technologies and applications that support revenue-generating opportunities and enhance the brand experience. By reducing the cost and complexity of integrations, Demandware LINK allows retailers to adopt innovative third-party technologies quickly and cost-effectively, allowing them to accelerate time to market and realize a faster return on their investment.

3dcart Adds Bizelo to Partner Group

Bizelo has joined the suite of partners for 3dcart to provide for management of centralized inventory, plus supply and returns management, between multiple online stores.

Bizelo pulls in disparate streams of data, running them through a central hub and sending them back  to sync inventory, supply, returns and accounting information in real-time. For 3dcart merchants managing storefronts on other software platforms (like eBay or Amazon), the tool simplifies how sales channels are managed in four key areas:

1.   Inventory: Merchants can manage what’s in stock, how items are priced—anything relating to inventory. When an item sells on one channel, inventory is updated through Bizelo.
2.   Supply: Navigating relationships with suppliers can get tricky. Through Bizelo, 3dcart retailers easy ways to manage the supplier relationship from end-to-end.
3.   Returns: Product returns and inventory restocking are simple with Bizelo. Whatever the channel, the application handles returns smoothly, updating data on all fronts.
4.   Accounting: Bizelo simplifies bookkeeping by bridging multiple sales channels with the merchant’s accounting software solution.

“Partnering with 3dcart opens up our potential audience to more than 15,000 online merchants,” said Evan Schwartz, Bizelo community manager. “The 3dcart integration makes our solution more comprehensive for all of our customers.”

“Maintaining multiple sales channels is a crucial way that online merchants extend their influence and gain more sales,” said 3dcart CEO Gonzalo Gil. “Bizelo is one of the easiest tools available to ensure those channels are managed efficiently through centralized, synced order processing.”