It may be a little early for Christmas shopping, but if you’re into books by authors like Stephen King and Dean Koontz, you may be able to benefit from a price war by three of the biggest eCommerce book sellers on the planet. About two weeks ago, Amazon and Wal-mart started selling a number of bestsellers at way below market price. In marketing terms, it’s called a loss-leader…selling a much sought-after product at a steep discount to attract customers who will hopefully buy other stuff while they’re poking around on your website.

In this case though, the deals were so good that the online retailers realized they were shooting themselves in the foot. The deal affected ten books bound for the bestseller list in the holiday shopping season. Hardcover copies of these books, that would normally retail for anywhere from $25-$35 each, were on sale for as low as $8.98. Since they were selling the books at below-wholesale price, small book sellers ran in and scooped up multiple copies so they could re-sell them in their own stores.

Now, two weeks after the sale started, the big retailers realized what was going on, and have just placed a limit on the number of copies each customer can purchase. Now you can purchase anywhere from 2-5 copies, depending on the retailer and the book; plenty enough for your gift list, but not enough for a smaller retailer looking to cash in on the re-sale bonanza. As usually happens when Amazon goes head-to-head with smaller book-stores, you had to know that, sooner or later, Amazon would make sure the little guy couldn’t scratch out any sort of advantage.

The undisputed heavyweight of eCommerce seems poised to soon become one of the biggest retailers on the planet. As of earlier this year, Amazon’s sales figures crossed a significant threshold. For the first time, their sales of what is perceived as their core products – books, movies and music – was surpassed by their sales of consumer products. That same threshold should be crossed by their worldwide operation later this year.

It’s this shift that has allowed Amazon to weather the recession and the overall slowing of the online sales of media like books and music. In fact, they aren’t just weathering the storm, they’re thriving. Despite the economic climate, their sales figures continue to rise, on the back of strong sales in those non-traditional consumer products. Last quarter, for example, their sales of media products rose by only 1%. But their sales for what they call “electronics and other merchandise” went up a startling 35%, to $2.07 billion dollars.

With eCommerce predicted to become anywhere from 10-15% of total retail in the next decade, and with their strong online market share, Amazon is in a position to become the ubiquitous Wal-Mart of the online retail world. Like Wal-Mart, Amazon saves huge amounts of money by revolutionizing the back-end of retail. Amazon doesn’t have to pay for retail stores, they do such a huge volume of business that they don’t have warehouses full of slow-moving merchandise, and their business model even allows them to pay supplier well after they’ve already sold the products.

It all adds up to a huge amount of trouble for the competition. Amazon has already been a contributing factor in the disappearance of a lot of small bookstores. And now they seem poised to gobble up a lot more of their competition, or run them out of business. They recently purchased an online competitor, Zappos.com, for what amounts to about $930 million dollars. And, if things keep going the way they are, that’s only the beginning.

Recent studies by Forrester Research and Akamai Technologies found that 40% of eCommerce shoppers will abandon a transaction if a page does not load within 3 seconds. So by this rationale, eCommerce sites can increase their sales potentially by 40% just by increasing the speed of their booking engine, server or shopping cart software to this margin. Ensuring that your server never goes down and always doing maintenance to your server drives BEFORE a problem occurs is also key. Another survey by Iperceptions for the Hotel and Hospitality industry shows that a similar trend exists in their eCommerce platforms. If a booking engine takes 3 seconds or longer 40% of potential guests will abandon their transaction.

Some larger companies like Wal-Mart have turned to 3rd party cloud based “Software as a Service” platforms to ensure the fastest loading times and most flexible and robust experience for shoppers. Wal-Mart’s recent eCommerce strategy has been commended by many in the industry as nothing mind blowing but definitely a smart and necessary repositioning of the retailer online. It still doesn’t challenge Amazon and eBay for traffic but by adding 1 million new items for sale on its new platform it should gain some ground or strengthen its position.

So long as each item’s page loads in under 3 seconds.