On Tuesday, July 26th 2005 Amazon.com inspired the e-commerce world of investors, third-party merchants, online publishers and dedicated customers to take notice. Amazon's management led by CEO, Jeff Bezos and CFO, Tom Szkutak presented the Company's quarterly report. During the call, the Seattle-based online global e-tailer announced record free cash flow fueled by lower prices and free shipping for customers.

The web cast of their Q2 2005 financial results can be found at:

Rugged Elegance recommends to its American audience that you become a member of Amazon Prime, Amazon.com's "All You Can Eat" Express Shipping Membership for a flat annual fee of $79.

Having become a member when the service was first introduced in January, we believe!

In fact, this is a case where we were personally inspired, and now we want to inspire the Rugged Elegance community. At least those of you in the U.S.

For the record, this story goes in the "smarter living" category.

Amazon touts:

Unlimited Express Shipping

* Free Two-Day Shipping on over a million in-stock items sold by Amazon.com
* Overnight Shipping for only $3.99 per item -- order as late as 6:30pm ET
* Ship to any eligible address in the contiguous United States

Effortless Shopping

* No minimum purchase required
* No need to consolidate items to save on shipping
* Convenient Sharing
* Share the benefits of your Amazon Prime membership with up to four family members living in the same household

For the 600,000 unique visitors around the globe who visit Rugged Elegant Living each month, when you see a link within a story, or when you click "more" to go to the second page of an article and see 1-5 related products in between these stories, these products have been hand-picked by Rugged Elegance.

If you choose to buy one or more of our related products, when you click on that product you are led into The Rugged Elegance World Marketplace. When you purchase this or any other product at that time, you will ultimately be led to check out through Amazon.

If your product is one that Amazon ships directly, as opposed to the thousands of products fulfilled through their third-party merchants, you have the opportunity to have that product shipped for $3.99 overnight or for free.

On Tuesday, Amazon's top management held a conference call with Wall Street analysts that reinforces the significance of their Amazon Prime service.

Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos said during the call:

Amazon Prime members love getting unlimited two-day shipping for free with no minimum order size.

Though expensive for the company, Amazon Prime creates a premium experience for customers who join, and as a result we hope they'll purchase more from us in the long term.

We suspect Amazon Prime is not well understood in the marketplace. If it was, every Amazon customer living in America would become an "Amazon Prime" member.

Rugged Elegance, one of Amazon.com's 900,000 affiliates, thinks it is an incredible value. We also think it changes the way online commerce is thought of for any and all consumers with a computer and an Internet connection.

First, let's step back and look at what Amazon Prime is.

People who purchase products online are currently invited to pay $79 annually in order to get free second-day shipping and $3.99 overnight shipping for any of the over one million qualifying products sold by Amazon.

Amazon Prime is all about convenience, price and selection. These attributes are at the core of what makes Amazon.com such a force in e-commerce.

Convenience

Up until 6:30pm Eastern time, for only $3.99 you can have your product(s) delivered the next day.

Or if you aren't quite so anxious to get your order, you can have them delivered in two days for free.

Instead of having to plan ahead 5-to-10 days to avoid shipping charges, as an "Amazon Prime" customer you can get what you need and want either overnight or in two days. And it doesn't even have to be $25 worth or products.

For this family, which has Zone Bars ordered nearly every week, along with heavier items that we would just as soon not put into our grocery basket, into our car, and then lug out of our vehicle and into the house, Amazon is saving our back, and the money in our back pockets.

For instance, a box of twelve Zone Chocolate Peanut Butter Zone Bars weighs over 1 pound. For a family of 5, who consumes a Zone Bar a day during the school year, Amazon is beginning to win over Trader Joe's time-and-time again, both because of convenience and price.

New parents have enough to carry around with a newborn, including their baby and an ever-expanding diaper bag.

At the time of publication, a 92-pack of Huggies Diapers (Step 6) cost $29.99 (retail $34.99) and weighs in at 12.70 pounds. That's nearly twice as heavy as most newborns!

On the other end of the spectrum, you could order a Hitachi 10' Dual Bevel Slide Compound with Laser which weighs 70 pounds for $469.99 (more on the "rugged" side of Amazon's product offerings) and get it delivered for $3.99 overnight.

For a gal who drives a Jeep Wrangler, buying a box of Riedel Cabernet/Bordeaux wine glasses, at a store would provide no room in the back seat for the kids. I did this recently as a gift for our attorney through Amazon Prime. What a gift to me!

I was so grateful to not have to load the box into my vehicle after purchasing it and again after adding six bottles of wine to the mix before shipping the even bigger box to Palo Alto.

Riedel Sommeliers Glasses

Price

Back in October, I went to one of my favorite stores in San Francisco and purchased six Riedel Sommeliers Series wine glasses as an anniversary gift to Tim. The Bordeaux glasses cost $100 a piece plus tax.

For nearly half that amount by going through Amazon, I could have purchased two sets of three of the same mix of Riedel glasses, with no sales tax, and no shipping charge.

Next time!

If you're flying to Asia and need some reading material to keep you occupied you can order the Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince for $16.99. It will cost you $3.99 to have it delivered overnight. The total price? $20.98.

On "All Potter's Eve" we paid $29.99 + tax in our local bookstore in order to get a copy of Rowling's latest book -- before our Amazon copy arrived the next morning.

The Amazon copy we ordered back in December was one of 1.5 million orders Amazon received worldwide in advance of the book's July 16th release. Amazon.com's largest new product release, which arrived as they promised on Saturday, July 16th, was shipped to Prime customers free-of-charge.

Selection

In the world of vast choices today, this lifestyle publisher (in search of the best of everything healthy, adventuresome and soulful) helps you discern which "rugged elegant" products are worth bringing to your attention from the millions of items available via Amazon.

With all this selection and the inexpensive, fast shipping via Amazon Prime, you start to ask yourself, "Is it easier and cheaper to order it online versus walking or driving to a local store?"

We haven't used the term "paradigm shift" in more than a decade because it got so overused, but Amazon's express shipping offering might just provide justification to bring that term back. Instead I would call it a "paradigm ship."

After the company's Tuesday, July 26th quarterly call with Wall Street analysts, we have further confidence that niche lifestyle publishers like Rugged Elegance can build a sustainable business identifying, in our case, products aimed at serving an audience base around the globe who appreciates learning about luxuriously unpretentious products, places, performances and other people. An audience who will support our efforts by not only reading but buying the products that relate to our stories. Yes, contextual commerce lives -- after all.

Amazon's commitment to:

1) convenience;;
2) low price;
3) selection

puts the company and their 900,000 affiliates in a "prime" position to remain more than dedicated to Amazon.

On Tuesday, Amazon reported sales of $1.75 billion, up 26 percent from $1.39 billion at the same point last year.

The company's gross profit -- net sales minus Amazon.com's cost of buying products -- rose to $450 million, up from $341 million at this time last year and about $35 million more than analysts had predicted.

Scott Devitt, an analyst with Legg Mason Wood Walker, pointed to strong sales from independent merchants selling their wares on Amazon.com.

Devitt said:

Third-party sales were very strong.

That, in my view, is what generated so much upside to the gross-profit numbers.

Devitt is right on the money.

And with Amazon's momentum their gross-profits are only going to increase when specialty boutique owners, as well as brand name manufacturers who currently sell only direct, begin to see the value of joining Amazon's powerful channel.

For our consumer audience, Rugged Elegance is no question bullish on Amazon Prime.

For the select San Francisco merchants we promote online via RuggedElegance.com and in our Companion neighborhood guides, we are considering encouraging these establishments to "set up shop" through Amazon's marketplace rather than building our own e-commerce solution to best serve them.

I would say that the party's just getting started.

As reported in Always On, the insider's network, Barry Diller recently told Kara Swisher, a technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal:

I think what's happened is that retail has finally taken off on the Net. Retail -- meaning big R retail -- was really the last category to catch on; it was a laggard, so to speak. Travel was kind of the first in terms of its adoption. And now retail is actually beginning to take a tiny, tiny base and beginning to take share.

About Amazon.com

Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN), a Fortune 500 company based in Seattle, opened its virtual doors on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers Earth's Biggest Selection.

Amazon.com seeks to be Earth's most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer customers the lowest possible prices.

Amazon.com and third-party sellers offer millions of unique new, refurbished, and used items in categories such as health and personal care, jewelry and watches, gourmet food, sports and outdoors, apparel and accessories, books, music, DVDs, electronics and office, toys and baby, and home and garden.

Amazon.com and its affiliates operate seven retail websites: www.amazon.com, www.amazon.co.uk, www.amazon.de, www.amazon.co.jp, www.amazon.fr, www.amazon.ca, and www.joyo.com.

The Market must have liked what was said today during Amazon's quarterly conference call with analysts because the company's shares jumped 9% in after-hours trading.

Shares of Amazon.com climbed $4.03, or 10.7 percent, to $41.77 in after-hours trading Tuesday.

The stock earlier closed at $37.74 on the Nasdaq Stock Market and has ranged from $30.60 to $45.68 in the past year.

To become a member of Amazon Prime, please go to:

Inspire & Be Inspired.

Here's to healthy, adventuresome, soulful, "a new kind of prime time" living!

~ Jennifer Carolyn King, Rugged Elegance, LLC