GSI Commerce Replaces Amazon as Toys R Us Ecommerce Provider

[shri]

Report in Seattle Times [seattletimes.nwsource.com]

GSI Commerce, based in that small Pennsylvania town near Philadelphia, said Wednesday it would power all of the toy- and baby-product sites for Toys R Us, in lieu of longtime partner Amazon.

Press release here [gsicommerce.com].

[matimer]

I like how it's a big deal because it's a company outside the inclusive nerd herd of "Silicon Valley"...

the internet doesn't begin and end in California

Just because everyone in California has a blog that talks about websites (cough cough Techcrunch) doesn't mean they're the only people making websites... GSI is a $750 million dollar company [google.com]

[shri]

My crude analysis of this is that the only winners are GSI and Exel the logistics partner.

TRU -- They're going to miss Amazon's upselling engine.
Amazon -- Lets see how quickly they can replace the inventory before xmas.

[PaulPA]

based in that small Pennsylvania town near Philadelphia

King of Prussia is about as much a small town as Sunnyvale and Cupertino. Its a major suburban area.

[Beagle]

I'm out on the Great Plains, so don't really care where the companies are located physically -but it sounds as if I'm going to have to pull a lot of amazon affiliate links on one of my sites 'cause the products they're linking to won't be there anymore.

[Morocco]

GSI is huge

[fraud master]

YES. We have been trying to sign TRU for years and I'm glad it finally came together. We also launched NFL back in April which was a much more quiet partner launch. Q4 is going to be insane this year though. We will be launching some more partners this year too.

[Huckleberry]

So essentially this will be much more transparent than when I go to toysrus.com and pull up amazon... I will be actually using the toysrus page to buy things from them but the backend is done through GSI... is that assumption correct?

I am glad that amazon is not going to be handling them anymore, I am not actually a big fan of the user interface for amazon, I know I may be in the minority there, but I just never liked the way it displayed the products and reviews for each...

Maybe this will be a much needed improvement.