Toys

Amazon.com, Inc. revealed the Holiday Toy List, where customers can find this season’s hottest toys, video games, sporting goods, electronics, movies and more.

The Holiday Toy List features innovative search tools that allow customers to quickly narrow and expand search results simultaneously by “bestselling” or “average customer review,” then filter by age, gender, category, price and discount.

“The Holiday Toy List is a helpful tool for parents, friends and family members who are searching for the perfect toys for the kids on their list,” says Sarah Wood, director of the Toy Store for Amazon.com. “With navigation that’s simple, convenient and fun to use, it’s easier than ever to find great gifts at Amazon’s everyday low prices.”

The Holiday Toy List features products from leading brands like Mattel, Jakks Pacific, Crayola, LEGO, Razor, Schwinn, Sony, Nintendo, Apple and Fender Starcaster. With most products in the Holiday Toy List eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping and Amazon Prime, customers will find great value and convenience in shopping at Amazon.com this holiday. Products Amazon.com expects to be among customer favorites include:

• Apple iPod touch 64 GB (3rd Generation), $379.98, Age 12 and up
• Bakugan 7 in 1 Maxus Dragonoid, $44.99, Ages 5 – 15
• Barbie Pink 3-Story Dream Townhouse, $144.88, Ages 3 – 10
• Bop It, $15.00, Ages 8 – 18
• Crayola Crayon Maker, $29.99, Ages 8 – 15
• D-Rex Interactive Dinosaur, $148.88, Ages 8 – 12
• Eyeclops Mini Projector, $93.24, Ages 8 – 15
• Fender Starcaster Strat Pack Electric Guitar with Amp and Accessories (Black), $199.89, Age 12 and up
• Fisher Price Elmo’s Tickle Hands, $24.00, Ages 2 – 6
• “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” (Blu-ray/DVD Combo + Digital Copy & BD-Live), $18.99, Age 8 and up
• Huffy Green Machine 2, $113.62, Age 6 and up
• Infantino Twist and Fold Activity Gym (Vintage Boy), $39.99, Ages 1 – 12 months
• Kodak Zi8 HD Pocket Video Camera (Raspberry), $149.99, Age 12 and up
• LeapFrog Zippity High-Energy Learning System, $79.97, Ages 3 – 5
• LEGO City Corner (7641), $59.96, Ages 5 – 12
• Liv Fashion Doll Sophie, $19.97, Ages 4 – 8
• Manhattan Toy Baby Stella Doll, $24.03, Age 12 months and up
• Matchbox Mega Rig Pirates Ship in Amazon Frustration-Free Packaging, $39.99, Ages 4 – 12
• Maxell M&M’s Earbud, $10.53, Ages 12 and up
• Mindflex Game, $74.99, Ages 8 – 15
• Monopoly City Edition, $29.41, Age 8 and up
• “Monsters vs. Aliens” (DVD), $16.99, Age 5 and up
• Nerf N Strike Elite Bundle (Nintendo Wii), $59.99, Ages 8 – 11
• New Super Mario Bros (Nintendo Wii), $46.99, Ages 8 – 11
• Nintendo DSi (Nintendo DS), $169.99, Ages 8 – 11
• Playskool Chuck My Talking Truck, $33.68, Ages 3 – 6
• Razor A Kick Scooter, $29.99, Age 5 and up
• Razor Rip-Rider 360 Drifting Ride-On, $89.87, Age 5 and up
• Scene It? Twilight Deluxe Edition, $28.24, Age 13 and up
• Schwinn Roadster 12-Inch Trike, $67.80, Ages 3 – 6
• Scribblenauts (Nintendo DS), $27.99, Ages 8 – 11
• “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (Two-Disc Blu-ray/DVD Combo + BD Live w/ Blu-ray packaging), $19.99, Age 5 and up
• Speakal iPig 2.1 Stereo iPod Docking Station with 5 Speakers (Pink), $95.50, Age 12 and up
• Sprig Toys Eco Recycling-Truck in Amazon Frustration-Free Packaging, $19.99, Ages 3 – 6
• Transformers Movie 2 Combiner Construction Devastator, $84.99, Ages 5 – 12
• “Up” (Two-Disc Deluxe Edition + Digital Copy), $21.99, Age 5 and up
• Wii Fit Plus with Balance Board (Nintendo Wii), $97.99, Age 12 and up
• Zune HD 32 GB Video MP3 Player (Platinum), $289.00, Age 12 and up

Please note that product prices and availability are subject to change. Prices and availability were accurate at the time this release was sent; however, they may differ from those you see when you visit Amazon.com or the Amazon.com Holiday Toy List at www.amazon.com/holidaytoylist.

Target.com said it is offering the books, including “Breathless” by Dean Koontz and “Ford County” by John Grisham, for $8.99, including free shipping.

More at Reuters<click>

This year November 1 falls on a Sunday. This is good news since some of the really early shoppers will make online purchases on this day and the next couple days because they assume it takes 4 to 6 weeks for deliveries. (This is very old school mentality since this was the amount of time required by the old Catalogs to ship an item.)

The next important date is November 26: Thanksgiving. November 27 will ne Black Friday for Brick-and-Mortar stores. Traditionally, whatever is reported from this day has no bearing whatsoever on what online sales will look like.

November 30 is ‘Cyber Monday’. This is the first day that online sales really show their stuff for the holiday season. Cyber Monday in itself is normally the 3rd biggest selling day of the year for Online Sellers. The 1st biggest day should be December 7th and the 2nd biggest day should be December 14th.

Holiday Dates

• Thursday November 26 – Thanksgiving
• Sunday December 6 – Christmas (GR)
• Saturday December 12 – Hanukkah
• Friday December 25 – Christmas (UK,US,CA)
• Saturday December 26 – Kwanzaa

Final Shipping Days (Domestic US)

• Thursday December 17 – Last day for most Standard Shipping
• Monday December 21 – Last day for Expedited Shipping
• Tuesday December 22 – Last day for Two-Day Shipping
• Wednesday December 23 – Last day for One-Day and Overnight Shipping
• Thursday December 24 – Last day for Same-Day Shipping (Shipped before 10 to 1 PM most time zones)

Remember, these dates are just approximations and that dates that you derive may differ slightly considering what your shipping service offers.

NEW YORK — An online book special offered by Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is turning into a full-fledged price war with Amazon.com.

Wal-Mart got things started Thursday, offering $10 prices on such upcoming hardcover releases as Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue” and John Grisham’s “Ford County,” a cut of 60 percent or more from the regular cost. Wal-Mart will also offer free shipping.

Amazon.com, the largest online bookseller, matched the $10 price, prompting Wal-Mart to take its offer to $9. By Friday morning, Amazon.com also had priced the books at $9.

More at Huffingtonpost

Amazon.com sellers are concerned that the marketplace is scaring off buyers of vintage, rare and collectible items due to a new price-warning feature. When an item’s price is over list-price, Amazon displays a yellow warning sign alerting shoppers with a notation of how much above list price it is.

More at Auctionbytes Blog

Think of it this way: There are millions of product listings on Amazon.com. During the holiday season, people unfamiliar with Amazon.com will be shopping the site as well as people pressed for time. What these people will be looking for, is the easy to find, inexpensive add-on top the order they are already going to place. You can easily provide them that easy inexpensive pick-up sale of that one last thing they were looking for. For instance, you may have a shop that sells mostly woman’s tops and blouses that run around $40.00 to $60.00. You should consider adding on some clothing and lint brushes that run $4.00 to $6.00.

You take extra time and set them up as an accessory product and the brushes will actually appear as suggestions on your clothing pages.

Taking these suggestions from the last four entries and utilizing with your Amazon.com listings will help improve your sales this year and improve your bottom line. There is nothing that says you are required to have a bad year in sales during a ‘trying’ economy.

These days, customers are well aware of the time and expense that goes into shopping even before the first purchase is made. They want to be able to go to one place, find what they are looking for, make their purchase and move on. It’s not so much about the shopping experience, it’s about convenience in a bad economy.

As an Amazon Seller, you can help to enhance this by bundling your products into logical units for sale. For instance, there is always the obvious bundle of putting together a battery powered device with batteries. There are other bundles that will become more apparent with a little research. For instance, take the time to go through your sales over the last year. Do you find patterns where people will buy one item and they buy a second item from you at the same time?

Another thing to take into consideration with bundling is the ability to further discount. Two items purchased separately usually cost more than if you buy two items that are together. For example: You can buy a coffee mug from one Amazon Merchant and coffee from another Amazon Merchant, but if you buy both together from the same Merchant the unit price will be lower and the shipping should be lower as well.

Bundling is a good and economical way to attract more traffic and more sales from your Catalog on Amazon.com and should be considered especially during this holiday season.

Next Entry> Capturing Sales With Stocking Stuffers

With unemployment running nearly 10% this year, spending will be very tight and shoppers will be looking for bargains from the onset.

Traditionally, Merchants on Amazon.com would wait just as their brick-and mortar brethren would do and only start discounting when they felt traffic to their products was running low or sales felt ‘off’.

This year the better tactic will be to get out ahead of the rest of the competition and start discounting early. Merchants will be able to start moving inventory faster and gauge earlier on if they want want to make a replenishment order from their manufacturers.

Merchants will also be able to guarantee more traffic to their listings. Amazon.com does have built into their system monitoring capabilities for the amount of discount of a product. If a product is found to have a decent discount and what customers are potentially looking for it will get some impressions on the front page of Amazon.com as well as on the various department landing pages. Later in the shopping season, your product will naturally get less impressions since more people will be discounting.

So the answer here is no mystery. While in past years it was always, ‘do I discount to get traffic or does traffic indicate I should discount’ this year it’s time to stop worrying about the ‘chicken or the egg’ scenario and get your discounts out in front early.

Next Entry> Bundling Products

This year promises to be especially harrowing. Several professional retail groups who customarily monitor sales and sales trends have already predicted a downturn in sales for this quarter.

Preparations for holiday sales have never been more important than they are this year.

One strategy normally not taken into consideration is the strategy of ‘running out’ of product.

Running Out

The traditional view of how to handle inventory for the holiday shopping season was to project sales volumes through the end of the fourth quarter and then ‘pad the numbers’ knowing that you could capture sales during ‘After Christmas Sales’ and in January.

Unfortunately this strategy has lead to the closing of several prominent retailers in the last year. It is easy to find yourself drowning in over stock and being forced to cut prices to the point where there are no profit points left. In this case every unit sold should be considered a loss since you have to account for storage, handling, accounting and shipping not traditionally considered in the final price of a sale product.

This year the better strategy would be to run out of product. The advantages of this are multifold.

• No overage; no storage costs being incurred by idle inventory.
• No extra handling needed after the holidays allowing you to cut overhead immediately after Christmas instead of mid to late January.
• Convert customers over to slower moving items.

The third item is actually the best. In many cases, merchants will carry multiple variations of the same thing. For instance you may carry Widgets and the Widgets come in three colors: Red, Blue and Green.

If you find Blue widgets are outselling Red and Green, there is a tendency to stock more Blue widgets. This inevitably assures two things will happen: You will have left over Blue widgets since you ordered more in the heat of the moment AND you still have those Red and Green widgets to contend with.

Better that you run out of the Blue Widgets and get some pick-up sales on the Red and Green leaving you with less post holiday inventory to wrestle with.

Next Entry> Traffic and Discounts

Conducted by the Opinion Research Corporation, the survey* found:

Monopoly is the all time favorite toy reported by survey respondents. This iconic board game, widely popular today, “beat” every other toy or game. Can anyone say “real estate moguls?”

• One in four respondents said that Barbie, the original material girl and constant re-inventor, is their favorite doll.
• Nearly one-third of the sample thrives off of competition, citing checkers as their all-time favorite classic game.
• Who remembers Monchhichis? These morphed monkeys were tied with Webkinz as the least favorite toy reported by survey respondents.

“eBay is the number one place to find the most coveted toys of this year, many of which are reinventions of nostalgic toy favorites,” said Cat Schwartz, eBay gadget and toy director. “This holiday season, I’m seeing numerous toys and games on the market that families can enjoy and experience together.”

All-Time Favorite Toy Guide

Video Game Systems: Although the Wii is tiny, it packs a lot of punch. The console is tied with PlayStation. Other popular systems were Nintendo NES and Atari.

Action Figures: Even without super powers G.I. Joe tramples his competition. Superman’s super powers only launched him into second place.

Fictional Toy Character: Christopher Robin is not the only one who treasures Winnie the Pooh — Pooh Bear was the front runner in the fictional character category. Curious George, the mischievous monkey, was the next most popular protagonist.

Classic Games: Even though there’s a king on board in a game of chess, checkers reigned supreme beating out chess as the cherished classic game.

Board Games: Monopoly’s Park Place was a favorite place to play, but more female respondents preferred to take their chance on Scrabble. These popular games that always attract new generations of players are available on eBay.

Educational Toys: Love to learn? LeapFrog Tag Reading System is the top educational toy, followed by Speak & Spell.

Dolls: Note to self, steer clear of life-like dolls when purchasing gifts this year. Our survey respondents ranked Betsy Wetsy as one of their least favorite dolls only giving her two percent of their votes.

Classic Toys: Fifty years after the toy was invented, Etch A Sketch is still going strong. Do people love playing with Etch A Sketch? You betcha!

Building Blocks: Half the respondents chose Legos as their favorite building blocks; clearly, they are still a favorite of today’s kids.

Stuffed Animal: Everyone loves to cozy up with something soft — and with whom do we most like to snuggle? Beanie Babies and Care Bears are the favorite creatures to cuddle.

*About the Survey: The findings are from a survey conducted online Oct. 9-10, 13-14 and 16-17, 2008 among a national sample of 3,272 adults 18 years of age and older. The online omnibus study is conducted twice a week among a U.S. sample of 1,000 adults 18 and older. Respondents were selected from among those who volunteered to participate in online surveys and polls. The data has been weighted to reflect the demographic composition of the 18+ population. Because the sample is based on those who initially self-selected for participation, no estimates of sampling error can be calculated. All sample surveys and polls may be subject to multiple sources of error, including, but not limited to sampling error, coverage error, error associated with non-response, error associated with question wording and response options, and post-survey weighting and adjustments.

Source – eBay Inc.