Business Model and Early Success
The company's business model was to charge vendors and purchasers a flat monthly fee for use of the site and to take a commission on sales. The business logic was that online purchasing would save hotels money by speeding up the purchasing process for towels, linens, soap and other basic goods. The company went public on the NASDAQ exchange in September 1999 and its stock price doubled in the first day of trading. In 1999 and 2000 the company entered marketing agreements with large Internet companies and business service providers like AOL and Office Depot. At its height, the company had 1,000 employees and a market capitalization of more than $4 billion.
Read more about this topic: Purchase Pro
Famous quotes containing the words business, model, early and/or success:
“...we shall never be the people we should and might be until we have learned that it is the first and most important business of a nation to protect its women, not by any puling sentimentality of queenship, chivalry or angelhood, but by making it possible for them to earn an honest living.”
—Katharine Pearson Woods (1853–1923)
“There are very many characteristics which go into making a model civil servant. Prominent among them are probity, industry, good sense, good habits, good temper, patience, order, courtesy, tact, self-reliance, many deference to superior officers, and many consideration for inferiors.”
—Chester A. Arthur (1829–1886)
““Never hug and kiss your children! Mother love may make your children’s infancy unhappy and prevent them from pursuing a career or getting married!” That’s total hogwash, of course. But it shows on extreme example of what state-of-the-art “scientific” parenting was supposed to be in early twentieth-century America. After all, that was the heyday of efficiency experts, time-and-motion studies, and the like.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)
“Obedience is the mother of success, and success the parent of salvation.”
—Aeschylus (525–456 B.C.)