Chapitre.com was an independent online bookstore, created in 1997 by Juan Pirlot de Corbion.
BOL.fr was the French subsidiary of BOL.com (BOL: Bertelsmann On Line), launched in August 1999 by Bertelsmann, a German media giant, in partnership with Vivendi, a French multinational company.
Unlike their counterparts in the U.S. and in U.K., where book prices were free, French online bookstores couldn't offer significant bargains. A French law - the Lang law - regulated prices. (Jacques Lang was the ministry of culture who fathered the law to protect independent bookstores.) The 5% discount allowed by law for both traditional and online bookstores was offering little latitude to Amazon.fr, Fnac.com, and the likes, who were nevertheless optimistic about the prospects offered by the French-language international market. A significant number of orders was already coming from abroad, with 10% of orders for Fnac.com as early as 1997.
Interviewed by AFP (Agence France-Presse) on the Lang Law and the meager 5% discount allowed for book prices, Denis Terrien, president of Amazon France (until May 2001), explained in August 2000: "Our experience in Germany, where book prices are also regulated, shows that prices are not the main factor for our customers to purchase books at Amazon. The main factor resides in the additional services we provide. We offer a whole bunch of services, beginning with a large choice in our catalog - we sell all the French cultural products. We have a powerful search engine. As for music, our site offers the only catalog searchable by song title. In addition to the editorial content of our site, which ranges from the one of a traditional bookstore to the one of a magazine, we have a customer service 24h/24 7days/7, something unique in the French market. Finally, an additional specificity of Amazon is our commitment for a fast delivery. We aim to have more than 90% of our products in stock (at our storage facility)."
Amazon's economic model was already admired by many in Europe, but could hardly be considered a model too for staff management, with short-term labor contracts, low wages, and poor working conditions.
Despite the secrecy surrounding the working conditions of the European staff, problems began to filter. In November 2000, the Prewitt Organizing Fund and the French union SUD-PTT Loire Atlantique launched an awareness campaign among the employees of Amazon France, after meeting with a group of 50 employees in the distribution center of Boigny-sur-Bionne. In a statement following the meeting, SUD-PTT denounced "degraded working conditions, flexible schedules, short-term labor contracts in periods of flux, low wages, and minimal social guarantees". Similar action was conducted in Germany and in U.K. Patrick Moran, head of the Prewitt Organizing Fund, founded an employee organization under the name of Alliance of New Economy Workers. In response, Amazon sent internal memos to its employees, stressing the pointlessness of unions within the company.
At the end of January 2001, Amazon, which employed 1,800 people in Europe, announced a 15% reduction of its European staff. It also closed its customer service center in The Hague (Netherlands). Its 240 employees were offered to work in one of the two other European customer service centers, in Slough (United Kingdom) and in Regensberg (Germany).
= Amazon worldwide
The second group of foreign clients - after European customers - was in Japan. In July 2000, during an international symposium on information technology in Tokyo, Jeff Bezos announced his intention to launch Amazon Japan in the near future. He insisted on the high potential of the Japanese market, with expensive real estate affecting the prices of goods and services and, as a result, online shopping being more convenient than traditional shopping. High population density would mean easy and cheap home deliveries.
A Japanese call center opened in August 2000 in Sapporo, a city on the Hokkaido island. Amazon Japan opened three months later, in November 2000, as the fourth subsidiary of Amazon and first non-European subsidiary, with a catalog of 1.1 million titles in Japanese and 600,000 titles in English. To reduce delivery times to 24 to 48 hours instead of six weeks for books published in the U.S., a large distribution center (15,800 m2) was created in Ichikawa, a town in the east of Tokyo.