It will be interesting to see just how good Amazon's business has held up in the tough economic landscape that it has been dealing with over the past few months.

On Wednesday, Amazon's main competitor eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY) reported its second quarter numbers, which could set the stage for what we will see from Amazon. While eBay was able to beat out analyst estimates, it did report a 5% drop in revenues.

Amazon is definitely going to have a tough time living up to the standard it set during the second period of last year. The company's second quarters are typically its lowest revenue ones, and last year it had one of its best ever second quarters.

In June, the company launched the Kindle DX with a $489 price tag, while lowering the price of the original Kindle model to $299, down from its previous $359 price. Amazon hoped that by lowering the price of its original Kindle it would spark more interest in the e-book reading device, and a product Amazon sees a lot of growth potential.

It is expected that we will soon be seeing a major transition into e-books and text books that will only be available in digital format. Amazon hopes that the Kindle will make it an early leader in the market. We have already seen more than 300,000 titles made available for download for Kindles and that list is expected to rapidly increase.

We should get some idea of how well the new Kindle DX has debuted, and how much interest has increased in the original Kindle since the price drop.

Meanwhile, Amazon also said Wednesday it would acquire Zappos.com, the online shoe retailer. Amazon offered $807 million in cash and stock.

There will be a couple key factors that come into play with this years second quarter results. Earnings will be impacted by the following:

• Strong third party merchant business
• Market share growth
• Sales from Kindle
• Declining margins
• Negative impact from foreign currency translation

Analyst take: Youssef Squali, an analyst for Jefferies & Co. is positive on Amazon. He currently has a "hold" rating on the stock with a price target of $85, above Wednesday's close of $88.79. He wrote in a note to clients that he likes the stock because of the way Amazon has been able to steadily add product subcategories and maintain strong site traffic. Both of these factors point to strong potential revenue growth for Amazon.

Earnings will be out after the market close, and we will see if Amazon is able to repeat the strong results we saw last period. If Amazon is able to beat estimates it will mark the sixth straight quarter of estimate topping earnings.