Kindle Fire Orders Off To A Great Start

Sales of Amazon’s new tablet, the Kindle Fire got off to a great start. According to eDataSource who track consumer sales, the pre-orders for the Kindle Fire reached 95,000 in the first 24 hours. This figure is quite a bit lower than the equivalent iPad sales figure. The iPad sales were 300,000 in the first 24 hours. However, Apple has had such a dominant position in the tablet market that it’s encouraging to see another tablet making such a strong debut. It looks like the iPad will have some rivals after all.

Amazon’s strategy in the tablet domain is an interesting one. According to analysts, they will likely lose money on the tablet itself. It will cost more to produce the hardware than they will recoup from the sale price. However, Amazon has always maintained that consumers will pay for high quality digital content and they have been proved right. They now have over 1 million e-books in their catalogue, 17 million songs and 100,000 movies and TV shows. More e-books are purchased than printed versions. It doesn’t matter if Amazon make no money from the tablet hardware. The sale of the content will determine the overall success. We’ve seen that price is a key factor in the tablet market. Consumers will buy tablets other than the iPad but not at the same price point. The HP TouchPad story demonstrated this point.

The Kindle Fire will go on sale at about half the price of an iPad. Unfortunately, Australians will not be able to purchase the Kindle Fire directly from Amazon when it launches in November.

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