Amazon on paid search and comparison shopping (1Q05 conf call quotes)

Amazon.com (ticker: AMZN) CFO Tom Szkutak and CEO Jeff Bezos were asked on their Q1 conference call about Amazon's reliance on advertising for traffic and the price impact of comparison shopping engines. Here are their answers:

Tom Szkutak  - Amazon.com - CFO

The majority of our traffic has been and continues to come from people coming directly to Amazon.com. We also do a variety of online marketing to get people to come to the site. Our best marketing dollars, we believe, are first spent on customer experience which includes lowering prices for customers and the free shipping initiatives, Amazon Prime, etc.

So we look first to spend dollars on customer experience and then on measurable marketing activities…

Justin Post  - Merrill Lynch - Analyst

And do you think growing use of search has made people more price conscious over the last few quarters?

Jeff Bezos  - Amazon.com - Founder & CEO

No, I would not say that. I think that there is a long-term trend that has been going on for a much longer period than that and will continue over the next number of decades where customers have better and better information. And that is basically we optimize our business based on that belief, that customers will continue to be empowered with better information, and that will happen online and off. We're organizing our business over time to do well in that kind of scenario.

(Quotes are from the CCBN StreetEvents transcript.)

Unrelated footnote: So Apple has expressed its objection to Jeffrey Young's forthcoming biography of Steve Jobs by removing all of
publisher John Wiley & Sons' books from its stores. Now, if that
makes you even more curious to buy the book, or you feel this smacks of
sensorship, you can buy the book from Amazon: iCon Steve Jobs : The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business. PS. Writing this on a Mac, which I love...