Toys R Us Inc., the No. 2 toy seller, said on Monday its online arm, Toysrus.com, filed a lawsuit charging that Amazon.com Inc. violated Toys R Us' exclusive rights to sell toys, games and baby products on the Amazon Web site. According to Toys R Us, its contract with the Web retailer states that Toysrus.com is the only authorized seller of toy and game and baby products on the Amazon.com platform through 2010. When the deal was signed in August 2000, Toysrus.com stopped selling products through its own site to move to Amazon.com.
"We expect Amazon.com to respect its contract with us and to support our position, especially, since we pay a very high fee to maintain this exclusivity," said David Schwartz, general counsel for Toys R Us, which is based in Wayne, New Jersey. "We would be happy to compete with other vendors in these categories, but we are not willing to pay for exclusivity that we are not receiving." Schwartz said that as of May 17 there were more than 4,000 products in exclusive categories being offered through competitive retailers on the Amazon.com platform, violating the agreement.
News source: Reuters
"We expect Amazon.com to respect its contract with us and to support our position, especially, since we pay a very high fee to maintain this exclusivity," said David Schwartz, general counsel for Toys R Us, which is based in Wayne, New Jersey. "We would be happy to compete with other vendors in these categories, but we are not willing to pay for exclusivity that we are not receiving." Schwartz said that as of May 17 there were more than 4,000 products in exclusive categories being offered through competitive retailers on the Amazon.com platform, violating the agreement.
News source: Reuters
The Benefits
-As a Related Community, your site or service will receive contextually relevant placement (a link and description) on the No. 1 corporate site and fourth largest Web site on the planet (according to Jupiter Media Metrics, 2003).
-You will have the opportunity to engage with a Microsoft Community Lead. A community lead is your personal, direct contact with Microsoft who can help you find answers to difficult questions, learn about upcoming events, and gain more insight into the product life cycle.
-You have the opportunity to include the Microsoft® Related Community logo on your community site or service.
-Your community site has the potential to be promoted to a Featured Community, receiving elevated exposure across Microsoft Web sites with your community site logo, link, and description. This is a great way to bring new traffic to your community site or service.
To Qualify
This program is open to contextually relevant community Web sites that meet all of the following base-level participation guidelines*:
-Predominantly devoted to peer-to-peer community features. Example: Newsgroups, discussion boards, chats, blogs, etc.
-Supports Microsoft products and/or services and technologies
Provides a visible reciprocal link back to the contextually relevant Microsoft community site home page
* If at any time your site does not meet all of these requirements, it may be pulled from the program. Microsoft will not include links to sites with inappropriate language, nudity/sexual content, violence, gambling/drugs/alcohol, etc.
Here's an interesting, but kinda off-topic, article about Wal-Mart & the toy business:
http://www.freep.com/money/business/toys17...17_20040217.htm
Last edited by 10547 on 24 May 2004 - 22:51
their toy selection isn't that great.
when i think to myself i need a toy for some kids birthday/christmas/whatever i instantly think toys 'r' us... defenitley not walmart!
very strange.
their toy selection isn't that great.
Exactly what the article above touches on. What they lack in selection/quality, they make up for in customer quantity. However, as they continue to kill off toy-only retailers, all those other toy manaufacturers that aren't in Wal-Mart suddenly have no place to sell & hurts the industry. Obviously, in addition to toys, that goes for countless other areas that Wal-Mart deals in.
No matter which product is in question, Wal-Mart can't touch the specialty stores. Yet due to their dabbling in all those areas under 1 roof, they still get more customers/sales than the majority of those specialty stores.
I could go on & on about the negative effects of Wal-Mart to the consumer, other retailers, manufacturers, etc (from dealing with them first-hand), but this is supposed to be about Amazon/ToysRUs so I save it for another day.
Last edited by 10547 on 24 May 2004 - 23:09
great article! very strange indeed. had no idea any of this was going on.
Whether it relates or not, Amazon.com hasn't always has the best ethics (ie. Alexa/Amazon privacy lawsuit, Amazon's ability to sell personal info under certain circumstances, etc).
Alister
Commenting has either been disabled on this article or you are not logged in. Click here to login or register, its free!
Note: Anonymous commenting is disabled in order to keep the quality of responses to a high standard.