Amazon Prime Day 2019: Don't make these 4 mistakes

Amazon plans to offer sales on an astounding 1 million products on Monday and Tuesday. But experts say to do your research before buying, because not every product will offer the best bang for your money.  In some cases, consumers may be better off waiting for Black Friday sales in November. Amazon Prime Day 2019 will kick off 48 hours of sales on Monday, but not everything on the site will be a bargain. As in any shopping situation, the age-old advice of "caveat emptor" -- buyer beware -- holds true during the 48-hour event. 

BEAUTY ‘We are in a unique position because of our scale’: Whole Foods wants to be a clean beauty destination

Whole Foods Market has been selling beauty products since it was founded in 1980 in its 500 doors, but as clean beauty and wellness have become mainstream, the Amazon-owned grocery store and market wants to be known as a beauty destination. Tasked with this goal is Jen Coccaro, director of merchandising for Whole Body, the beauty and wellness sector of the company. Coccaro, who has been with the company since 2017, has been focused on not only educating current Whole Foods shoppers, who are health-conscious and between 22 and 40 years old, about its beauty offerings, but also recruiting new brands to prioritize Whole Foods as a distributor and partner. Still, Whole Foods’ in-store revenue has largely stayed flat since being fully integrated into the Amazon fold in 2018, according to the company’s most recent earnings in April.

CVS just laid out a big reason why health companies are worried about Amazon

When word spread that Amazon would move into health care in 2017, health-care executives had a ready answer: We are not afraid. “I honestly don’t believe that Amazon will be interested in the near future in the next few years in this market,” Walgreens’ CEO Stefano Pessina told investors in an earnings call in July 2017. “I think we have a lot of capabilities and a value proposition that can compete effectively in the market,” CVS CEO Larry Merlo said back in August. But recent legal actions tell a different story. In April, CVS filed a lawsuit against John Lavin, a former senior vice president in charge of CVS Caremark’s retail pharmacy network, after Lavin told the company he was leaving to take a job at Amazon’s pharmacy arm, PillPack. The judge this week ruled in CVS’ favor, preventing Lavin from taking immediate employment at PillPack.

Amazon to Joe Biden: We pay all the taxes we owe

New York (CNN Business)Joe Biden jumped into the debate over corporate taxes with a jab at Amazon on Thursday, and Amazon jabbed back. "I have nothing against Amazon, but no company pulling in billions of dollars of profits should pay a lower tax rate than firefighters and teachers. We need to reward work, not just wealth," the former Vice President tweeted, linking to a New York Times story from April about how Amazon got a rebate on its corporate taxes in 2018. In the early evening, Amazon responded: "We've paid $2.6B in corporate taxes since 2016. We pay every penny we owe. Congress designed tax laws to encourage companies to reinvest in the American economy. We have. $200B in investments since 2011 & 300K US jobs. Assume VP Biden's complaint is w/ the tax code, not Amazon." According to the left leaning Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy, Amazon got a $129 million refund on its $11.2 billion in profits in 2018 because of various tax credits. Taking out state taxes, the last time the company paid federal taxes was in 2016, according to the group's analysis of regulatory filings.

To power Prime one-day shipping, Amazon asks sellers to send it more stuff

Amazon is offering deep warehouse discounts to its sellers in a bid to jump-start its Prime one-day shipping program. The company last month announced plans to transition its popular Prime membership deliveries from two-day shipping to one day. To increase the number of items it can offer for one-day delivery, Amazon will need to have more stuff spread around its US warehouses, where it can be closer to more customers. So, the company on Wednesday sent out an email to sellers, offering discounts of up to 75% on Amazon warehouse storage fees in exchange for sellers storing more of their most popular products with the company. Amazon stores, packages and ships independent sellers' items through a program called Fulfillment by Amazon. 

Amazon considered letting Alexa listen to you without a wake word

A patent made public today and filed by Amazon would allow the company's voice assistant Alexa to start recording audio before users say a "wake word." According to the patent, it would allow users to more naturally communicate with their devices, saying phrases like "Play some music, Alexa" rather than starting each command with "Alexa" or another chosen wake word. Currently, the voice assistant is unable to listen to or understand commands until the user utters the wake word. In practice, the patent would allow Alexa to "look backward" at recent things said aloud prior to hearing its name. For example, if a user said something like, "What's the weather going to be like today, Alexa?" the device would hear the trigger word "Alexa" and quickly go back over the prior phrase to process the command.

Amazon smashes earnings expectations

Amazon reported first-quarter earnings on Thursday that reflected an ongoing change at the company: less growth but fatter profit margins. Despite the huge earnings beat, Amazon stock is up just 1% in after-hours trading, as second-quarter operating profit guidance came below street estimates. Here are the most important numbers:

Amazon and Google settle feud, bring YouTube back to Fire TV devices

Feuding tech giants Amazon and Google have come to an agreement on their streaming services. After over a year of absence, the official YouTube app will return to Amazon Fire TV devices and Fire TV Edition smart TVs. Google pulled the video streaming app in early 2018 after it could not strike a deal with the online retail giant surrounding the availability of its products and services. According to reports at the time, Google was unhappy with Amazon because the retailer didn't sell a number of its products, including Chromecast and Google Home devices. The two companies couldn't strike a business deal that pleased both parties, so Google removed the official YouTube app from Fire TV devices at the start of 2018. This came a

Here’s What One Amazon Bull Took From the Annual Jeff Bezos Letter

This week’s release of Jeff Bezos’ annual letter to shareholders was a newsmaking event, what with the Amazon.com (ticker: AMZN) CEO challenging the company’s retail rivals to raise pay and putting eBay (EBAY) in the spotlight. Shares of Amazon, recently about flat at $1,844.50, are up more than 20% in 2019. Bullish analyst Anthony Chukumba of Loop Capitalon Friday reiterated a Buy rating on the stock, as well as a $2,200 price target that is about 19% higher than current levels and above FactSet’s $2,128 analyst average. He cited three key items from Bezos’ letter:

Amazon Jumps Back Into Corporate Renewables Market

Amazon on Monday said it will buy power from three future wind projects, two of them in Europe and the third in the U.S., while signaling that more deals could be coming soon. The announcement marks a return to the corporate renewables market for one of the biggest buyers of years past. The tech giant will back 229 megawatts of new wind capacity from projects in Ireland, Sweden and California to serve Amazon Web Services’ fleet of data centers. The wind farms will be built over the next two years. A 91-megawatt wind farm will be built in Donegal, in the Republic of Ireland, while a similarly sized project will be built in Bäckhammar, Sweden — near the windy coast of Vänern, the largest lake in the European Union.