The couple admitted that they had lived a great life together.

Ms. Bezos keeps a 4% stake in the online retail giant, worth $35.6bn on its own.

Their journey of togetherness

Jeff Bezos, found Amazon in 1994, a year after the couple married, and Mrs. Bezos was one of its first employees.

Jeff Bezos is 55 years old, and MacKenzie, 48, during their divorce.

MacKenzie is a novelist, she married in 1993 and the couple has four children.

The conversation happened on Twitter. Where both parties had positive comments about each other, as they were departing, with an announced settlement.
However, the couple hasn’t presented any further financial details about the settlement.

Indeed the richest divorce

Just, the Amazon shares will make Ms. Bezos the world’s third-richest woman while Jeff will continue as the world’s richest person, according to Forbes.

Well, Mrs. MacKenzie Bezos’ tweet is her only tweet since she joined the microblogging website this month.

” I’m grateful to have finished the process of dissolving my marriage to Jeff with support from each other”.
Mr. Bezos tweeted in response:

“I’m so grateful to all my friends and family for reaching out with encouragement and love… MacKenzie most of all”.

The tweet concluded with: ” MacKenzie is resourceful, brilliant, and loving, and as our futures unroll, I know I’ll always be learning from her”.
Mr. Bezos held a 16.3% stake in Amazon, prior to the divorce settlement.

He will retain 75% of that holding but Ms. Bezos has transferred all of her voting rights to her former husband.
As per the reports, MacKenzie will also give away her interests in the Washington Post newspaper and Mr. Bezos’ space travel firm Blue Origin.
Amazon is now a boundless online retail business.

Amazon generated sales of $232.8bn last year.

Also, it has helped Mr. Bezos and his family amass a fortune of $131bn, as per Forbes magazine.

About Ms.MacKenzie Bezos

Ms. Bezos is a successful novelist who has written two books, The Testing of Luther Albright and Traps.

She was a student of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Toni Morrison at Princeton University.

Toni Morrison once said of her students that Ms. Bezos was one of the best students she ever had in her creative-writing classes…

Well, Mr. Jeff Bezos is reportedly seen in a relationship with former Fox TV host Lauren Sánchez.
After Mr. Bezos and his wife announced in January about departing, a US tabloid magazine published details, where private messages, of an extramarital affair with Ms. Sánchez, enlisted.
Responding to it, Mr. Bezos blamed the magazine publisher, American Media Incorporated, for blackmail. The publisher refuses the claim.
This divorce deal of Mr & Ms. Bezos overshadows a previous $3.8bn record set in 1999 by art dealer Alec Wildenstein and his wife Jocelyn, who was popular for her cosmetic surgery.

Nike is following a new strategy for the marketing of their products. After the arrival of their new CEO, John Donahoe they are focusing on the elevation of consumer behavior. The analyst continued by saying, “The move shows us that strong brands realize that traffic is driven to their own site example Nike.com is self-sustaining, more profitable, and actually brand-enhancing, while traffic and incremental revenue from Amazon.com is less profitable but also less brand enhancing.”

Photo Credit: USA News Hub

Amazon has been working on becoming a bigger name in the fashion world. The company has already contacted influencers to promote their brands ahead of the sales. Brands like Calvin Klein, Seras, Chico’s, Nike, etc are courted by Amazon. But the decision of Nike to leave the company can influence other brands to cut off from the e-commerce giant. As said by the analyst Randy Konik, “We believe much strong apparel and even non-apparel brands will continue to avoid or curb their relationships with Amazon in the future.”

The retail business contributes to 68% of the company’s whole business and if these brands started following Nike in the decision of leaving Amazon, then this will affect Amazon entirely.

There is a wide range of products manufactured by the company that includes various home gadgets and speakers uses the virtual assistant of Amazon named Alexa. Alexa helps the users control the devices and ease their way by working through voice commands. This virtual assistant store a part of your information and work accordingly. But to disable this, Amazon earlier launched a feature.

The new feature earlier introduced by Amazon let the users delete a part of your conversation with Alexa. This can be done with the help of simple voice commands like “Alexa, delete what I just said” or “Alexa delete everything I said today” and your virtual assistant will work accordingly.

And now Amazon has revealed about an all-new feature that will be the next level of privacy. Now the virtual assistant comes with an option of auto-delete. This means now the software let you select a specific time frame and once you select it, Alexa will automatically delete everything you said during that time period. It comes with two options, three months and eighteen months.

Photo Credit: Barron’s

Due to the one day delivery the promise, the company is attracting more and more prime members. This news is pretty great for the company and it is all because of the perks that the public get for being a Prime member. However, according to the sources, it is revealed that the one-day delivery promise is very expensive for the company.

The second quarter shipping investment of Amazon has exceeded the amount of $800 million. This is reportedly a high amount of investment for a company for shipping but they are also drawing profit from this opportunity as the number of prime members is continuously increasing.

The chief financial officer of Amazon, Brian Olsavsky said that they saw some additional transition costs in their warehouse. He said further that with one-day delivery offers, the company is getting more and more Amazon Prime member subscription and the concept has been really famous lately. According to the retail managing director the sales of products grew to 35.89$ billion from $31.86 billion.

Amazon is providing same-day delivery options to their Prime members and to keep-up in the competition, other contemporaries of Amazon also came up with the same and Amazon is doing every effort to win the delivery wars and that is why the company is making their warehouse workers work really hard unstoppably so that it can beat its competitors.

Photo Credit: Engadget

Amazon employees around the globe have various complaints including lesser and time-bound bathroom breaks, extremely odious quotas, mandatory shift on holidays and they have also complained about the fact that they have to compulsorily take pain medication during work hours because of the nature of their job and the lack of rest breaks.

The company is trying to introduce robotic arms, conveyor belts so that the workers can have less manual work at their warehouse. Amazon also agreed to provide the of paying $15 per hour, paid holidays and better medical plan to its employees who work at fulfillment facilities and warehouse.

Walmart is providing discounts on the products that are not sold by Amazon. These products include some Google Gadgets like TVs and Speakers. The reason behind these products not being sold by Amazon is that they are in the direct competition with Amazon’s own products. And therefore they are not included in the exclusive deals so if you don’t find your desired products on Amazon, then the good news is, you can find them on Walmart and get the best price.

Photo Source: Business Insider

The exclusive deals of Walmart include the rarely discounted Google Home Max Smart Speakers. They are also launching heavy discounts of 4K smart TVs and a variety of Apple Products like the 32G iPad. The shopping event by Walmart is getting started one day prior to the Amazon Prime Day and will end one day after it.

The long list of rarely discounted items in Walmart deals includes various security alarms and indoor-outdoor cameras by Google, Bake ovens, Laptops by Dell and Lenovo, Chromebook by Acer and Samsung, Google Home, Doorbell, 4K TVs, TV Accessories, Apple Products, Tablets, E-readers, etc.

One of the most competitive markets today has got to be the online shopping market. When one begins to talk about online shopping the name “Amazon” is bound to come up.  The tech giant has always been a pioneer in the world of online shopping and has introduced schemes and plans that have revolutionized online shopping as we now know it.

In early 2005 Amazon announced its Prime feature that basically enabled a user to have a variety of additional services upon payment of $79 to the company. These services included the very lucrative 2-day delivery guarantee which assured all Prime users the delivery of their orders in less than 48 hours from the time of placing the order.

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The move not only attracted more customers to shop online but also forced other shopping portals to follow suit, today, most shopping portals have the two-day delivery option. Amazon, however, is choosing to push the limits of its resources as it is now saying that by the end of 2019 they will be ready to introduce a one-day delivery guarantee to all of its Prime users. Now this change will be expensive and it will maybe increase the amount to be paid for a Prime membership slightly higher than its current $119.

The move by Amazon, already the largest online shopping platform in the world is now going to strengthen its position at the top of the food chain. The other companies will have to try and follow suit eventually but it is infinitesimally harder for these companies to do this given that they do not possess the resources that Amazon has access to.

Even Amazon in all its might can offer this service other than on a select number of products that it estimates comes up to almost a million products. There is a certain amount of speculation on the practicality in the fulfillment of this promise as it would force them to hire more workers, find a sustainable means of speedy transport while not putting the safety of these workers on the line. If somehow Amazon does manage to pull it off some analysts are doubtful that it would be as successful as it was in 2005. It sounds like it is offering a lot more but in truth, the Prime users receive their packages well in advance from the two-day deadline.

The customers may not be greatly impressed by a revision of merely the rule on paper while it is already in practice. But, this move does not fail to set the other online portals scrambling to catch up as they always do right after Amazon announces anything new. In a poll conducted it was found that the customers value the free delivery more than the limited time in which they receive their package.

Amazon, however, is not one to rest, it is working on shipping packages at an unbelievable pace of 2 hours by partnering up with rapid delivery service providers. They are also working with drones that will deliver packages in 30 minutes, they have not started testing it in the mainstream yet. They are in their early stages of testing in England, on an interesting side note Google just received clearance to test its drones in Virginia. The question is, to what length will these companies go to in order to provide us with the comfort of “convenience” and are they taking it too far?

The entry of tech giants in consumer finance was something that seemed almost bound to happen. There have been many cases of the tech giants that have waded into these shark infested water, it was never seen openly in the public domain.

All this one could say changed recently as we saw in Cupertino, California where Apple released their new credit card last month with a great deal of pomp. This was a pioneering move by both Apple and the industrious bank, Goldman Sachs who are one of the key partners in the deal.

In the announcement, one would not have known that Goldman Sachs had played such a major role in the decision when we saw the mere passing reference made to them as nothing more than a footnote in the event. The entire event was handled and hosted by Tim Cook the CEO of Apple Inc. as the CEO of Goldman Sachs stood on the sidelines and clapped while in truth he should have been proposing the plan along with Cook on stage.

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This entire situation is in a way satirical and almost accurate representation of what the market and Wall Street will be reduced to if in future they continue to collaborate with these technological giants.

However, the question that most people have on their minds is whether or not these banks are ready to sacrifice their place in the driver’s seat because of the millions of customers that partnership with these tech giants would bring them into their banks. This is is a dilemma that the banks clearly have to face where they lose something integral irrespective of the decision they make.

If they choose not to entertain the partnerships of these tech giants they lose out on an opportunity to have millions of new customers join them. But, if they do accept a partnership they seem to be taking a backseat in all the ventures and decisions and may just become another front for these extremely successful companies.

The tech companies also have a reason for needing these partnerships. As they enter the world of consumer finance these tech giants need these Wallstreet heavy hitters in order to navigate this new terrain. It is not all great news for the banks as mentioned earlier as if these deals are agreed upon the more lucrative facets of the company like the customer relations and branding will go to the tech companies. The stakes, however, are higher than they have ever been with almost 40% of the $1.35 trillion in revenues that will go to these companies like Amazon and Apple, and maybe also to price competition.

American tech companies are in a way looking to their Chinese counterparts like Alibaba and Tencent as inspiration, these companies have already become major players due to their mobile applications that have greatly increased their ease of transactions, investing and payments.

American companies like Google, Amazon, and Apple are not far behind as they have begun to encroach on the turf of the banks. Google has Google Pay, Apple has Apple Pay, Amazon has Amazon Cash and Amazon Pay with which customers shop online and even Facebook is looking to enable payments via Whatsapp. These tech giants are doing this in order to fuel their revenue growth and also help them strengthen their grip on the market.

Amazon made the announcement on Thursday that it will be spending $ 800 million for improving its logistics and warehousing. It said the standard delivery schedule for the Prime subscriber will now stand changed to one day and this will be made a reality by the second quarter of the current financial year.

This had a very serious effect on the competitor shares. The effect was witnessed almost instantly where Target experienced a 5 percent decline in its shares on Friday, while the shares of Walmart witnessed a fall of 2.5 percent.

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Amazon has over 100 million Prime subscribers across the US. With Amazon already having a sway over the US households, the move to reduce the standard delivery to one day can now have a substantial impact on the fortunes of the company. Needless to say, Walmart and Target – or even the other competitors may need to work hard to meet these changing scenario.

It should be noted here that Amazon started the two day delivery for the Prime subscribers around 14 years ago and changed the world for better.  The new one day dispatch will now definitely introduce a huge change, the industry experts expect. Morgan Stanley analyst Brian Nowak states that “other brands, manufacturers, retailers, and logistics companies to have to invest more aggressively to compete with Amazon and its differentiated delivery”. This is indeed set to increase to cost to compete will definitely rise.

It should be noted that Walmart had started the free two-day shipping for order values more than $35 in 2017. Target, on the other hand, moved to a two-day delivery schedule in 2018. The option is available for the credit card holders with no conditions of minimum purchase.

This can even give a big boost to concepts like Buy Online and pick from the nearest store concept. In fact, not only Walmart an Target, but other Amazon competitors like Best Buy, Kohl’s and others have been considering to give it a thought. This is an area where Amazon has not been able to achieve. This can help you achieve a good network of brick and mortar stores. The concept has been steadily growing over the years, and the trend was reported in at least 46 percent of the online shoppers in the US. This is a huge growth of such customers over the last year.

So, can this have another impact? We have been witnessing a growing feud between the online stores and brick and mortar stores. The new development can bring in a situation where the online and offline stores begin working together and work towards a common platform.

Amazon said, starting from July, it would no further run the domestic marketplace. However, Chinese purchasers will still be able to order goods from Amazon’s global store.
And the firm will also continue to operate its cloud business in China.

Reasons for its decision…

The retail defense comes as Amazon faces tug off war from local rivals Alibaba and JD.com.

Reuters:

Amazon’s plans to close its domestic marketplace in China by mid-July is to focus on more lucrative businesses to sell overseas goods and cloud services.

Well, Amazon’s profitable cloud computing team hosts huge swathes of the corporate world on its data servers.

A spokesperson for Amazon said:

Amazon is working closely with our sellers to ensure a smooth transition and to continue to deliver the best possible customer experience.
Amazon.cn, the consumers accessing Amazon Chinese web portal, after 18 July will see a selection of goods from its global store, as per Bloomberg.
Way back in 2004, Amazon had bought Joyo.com, Chinese books, music, and video retailer, for $75m (£57.4m).  Amazon then rebranded the company as Amazon.cn in 2007.
Yet it has grappled to compete with governing players JD.com and Alibaba’s Tmall marketplace in China.
This shift away from the world’s second-largest economy comes as the company pours huge investment into India.
Meanwhile, Amazon has pledged to spend $5.5bn on e-commerce in India, where it clashes with local rival Flipkart.
Also, last year, Amazon had launched a Hindi version of its mobile website and smartphone app in an effort to attract millions of new customers in the nation.