Ecommerce giants Amazon and Play have recently decided to challenge Apple’s dominance in the MP3 market by offering MP3 downloads as part of its service. Amazon launched Amazon MP3 with the intention of reducing Apple’s markets share by undercutting it’s prices whilst maintaining the convenience of the iTunes store. As far as first year’s go, a 5-10% market share isn’t that bad, but Amazon is little more than inconvenience to Apple who still dominate the market share with over 70%.

It appears that any market share gained from Amazon was from other small MP3 download services, meaning iTunes has remained pretty much intact.

So why is iTunes so immovable from it’s perch as king of the MP3 downloads? Sure, nothing beats the convenience of simply pressing ‘buy’ and seeing it in your iTunes library seconds later as if it’s always been there, but you’d think that the more competitive prices of Amazon and Play would have made more of a dent than a scratch. Those with the knowledge will know that it only takes a second to import and Amazon download into iTunes.

I’m sure Amazon will continue as normal however with it’s MP3 download service – there’ really nothing to loose. A market with virtually no operating costs, no delivery charges, unlimited stock and clearly booming in comparison to traditional CD high street sales. It’s a division that all online music sellers should incorporate – but just don’t expect to loosen Apple’s grip on the market!

Wordpress has been hailed in blogging platform circles for a number of years for it’s excellent open source contribution to the world of bloggers. Not only is it free and open source while being very simple to modify, it is also capable of executing impressive levels of functionality using it’s vast plugin library. E-commerce is not something you’d normally associate with this sort of platform – we already know that Magento is a very complex adaptation of open source code to create shopping cart software, so surely Wordpress is already the best at what it is?

http://www.instinct.co.nz/e-commerce/

The WP-Ecommerce plugin for Wordpress developed by New Zealand team Instinct is a ’state-of-the-art e-Commerce platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards and usability. It is both free and priceless at the same time.’

It certainly picks up on the Wordpress focus towards simplicity, usability and multi-platform integration. My question as a new potential user is regarding the depth of the software. The lack of apparent support suggests that it is on the whole fairly easy to use. There has also been little said about the platform’s backend, which will be fundamental in its ease of use.

I’ll have a review of it once I make progress with its development.