Snap.com Links Up With Barnesandnoble.com

Newly public online bookseller barnesandnoble.com (Nasdaq: BNBN) took a significant step toward taking away market share from industry leader Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) with a new e-commerce deal today.

Barnesandnoble.com announced a bookselling deal with portal site Snap.com, which is owned by NBC and CNET and should benefit greatly from the newly formed interactive division of NBC.

Under the terms of the agreement, every search result page on Snap.com will include a link to a co-branded Snap.com/barnesandnoble.com page with books related to searches.

Barnesandnoble.com will handle the transaction process and customer service. Snap.com is now a member of barnesandnoble.com’s affiliate network.

“With barnesandnoble.com’s commitment to book buyers, this partnership will further Snap.com’s goal of connecting users to exactly what they are looking for on the Internet,” said Sam Parker, vice president of Snap.com.

How Will Barnesandnoble.com Expand Next?

Barnesandnoble.com, the fifth largest e-commerce retailer according to Media Metrix, already has strategic alliances with other major portal and content sites, including AOL, Lycos and MSN.

The question now is what barnesandnoble.com does with the $421.6 million it raised in its initial public offering last week. After all, the company’s main competition, Amazon.com, has branched into other categories with investments in companies like Drugstore.com and Pets.com and new services like an auction house.

Barnesandnoble.com may have to do more than sell books and music to continue its growth. However, the growth of Amazon.com has a big price. Wall Street has been taking a long hard look at Amazon.com lately and is losing patience with the company’s growing losses. Shares of Amazon.com had been cut in half in recent weeks. It seems wise for barnesandnoble.com to expand its business, but the recent sell off of Amazon.com’s stock also illustrates that barnesnandnoble.com will have to spend a great deal of money to attract new users. Spending that money could lead to some gyrations in its stock price.

Snap.com Looks To Grow Fast

Barnesandnoble.com’s alliance with Snap.com, which has nearly 10 million users each month and bills itself as the fastest growing portal site, should increase in value very soon. Later this year Snap.com will be merged with several NBC Internet properties and leading e-commerce site XOOM.com (Nasdaq: XMCM) to form NBC Internet, the first publicly traded Internet company integrated with a major broadcaster.

The new company expects to create the seventh-largest Internet site and will benefit from offline promotion on NBC’s television properties. Barnesandnoble.com, as well as all Snap.com partners, will benefit because Snap.com will become the anchor site of the new Internet company,

NBC Internet expects to attract more than 18 million unique users each month, based on the traffic that the sites that will be part of the venture already are getting.