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Originally Posted by JoeD
It doubt it would happen with agency pricing pricing in place. Why shop anywhere other than amazon when you're guaranteed the same price and better ecosystem?
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Because you get better *books* in other places; mobi doesn't support some of the features that epub has. While most of those are unimportant in most cases, if they matter to you for a notable-if-small number of your books, Amazon isn't going to be your first choice for buying.
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Without agency, retailers have room to try alternative ways to get customers in as kobo appear to be trying with their discounts atm on non-agency titles. They're still going to have to find a way to compete on the ecosystem front and I don't know what form that could take but they'll need something.
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Fictionwise did great before agency prices started to kill them--you bought Micropay dollars, and they'd regularly have discounts like "Buy this book, get half its value in $MP added to your account." So it's "buy one, get one half off"--but you can decide on the half-book later. And then that money is already there in your account, so you've got an incentive to browse through the store.
That, and their Buywise club--$15/year for a 15% discount on all purchases, and the occasional extra bonus--was enough to keep people coming back to the store even if other places had a wider selection or better overall prices.
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Pricing wise though, if enough retailers had discounts on _different_ books, Amazon could not afford or more likely would not want to afford the cost of matching all of them. They may just stick to offering lower cost best sellers.
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People forget that all this drama was started by Amazon offering lower-price bestsellers *only*... while they did other discounts, they weren't constant or reliable. They advertised "NYT Bestsellers for under $10" and counted on making up the difference in other sales.