Posted by Tom Moertel
Thu, 24 Jun 2010 19:59:00 GMT
Recently, I discovered an interesting flaw – or is it a feature? – in
Amazon.com’s marketplace.
It all started when I bought economist Albert O. Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. I had been reading an old printing from
the library, but it was riddled with highlighting; now I wanted a
clean copy to read without distractions.
On Amazon.com, I found exactly what I wanted. A third-party seller
had listed a new copy for just $6.50. I bought it.
Shortly after the order, Amazon sent me an email confirming that my
book had been shipped. In the email, the book was described as
follows:
Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States
Sold by: XXXXXXX
Condition: new
Quantity: 1
$6.50 each
Here’s where things get interesting. Around the time I received the shipment notice, I also received a cryptic communication from the seller:
I wish I had a pristine copy to send you but, while this
book has wear at its front, I am confident it will serve you well, as
it served me.
I didn’t think much of it until I received the book a
week later. The book was, of course, riddled with highlighting.
Confused, I went back to Amazon.com to figure out what went wrong. I
logged in, clicked on the order listing, and was shown the following
summary of my order:
1 of: Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States [Paperback]
By: Albert O. Hirschman
Condition: Used – Good
Sold by: XXXXXXX (seller profile)
Note that the condition is now listed as “Used – Good”, not new as it
had been when I placed the order. Amazon allowed the item I
had ordered to be changed after I had ordered it! What’s
worse, Amazon now lists the changed item on the final invoice for the
purchase.
In effect, Amazon has rewritten the history of my order. It’s as if I
had ordered a used copy of the book in the first place. I’m lucky I
kept that original email! Without it, how could I document what I
had actually ordered?
Like most people, when I order something online, I expect that
clicking the order button forms an implicit agreement between buyer
and seller: in exchange for my money, the seller will deliver the
product that I ordered, as it was represented to me when I placed the order.
That Amazon allows this agreement to be rewritten – behind the
buyer’s back – seems like a huge flaw in its marketplace. It’s such
an obvious flaw that I have a hard time believing it exists. Amazon
is very good at the buyer-experience game; if it allows this “flaw” to
exist, my hunch is that there must be a good reason for it. The
trouble is, I can’t think of what that reason might be.
But my hunch is made more plausible by Amazon’s A-to-z
Guarantee. Knowing
that the guarantee will protect customers affected by the flaw gives
Amazon the option of not fixing it. My guess, then, is that Amazon’s
engineers thought about fixing the “flaw,” discovered a good reason
not to, and decided to leave it alone.
Which raises the question, what is a compelling reason to allow a
buyer-seller agreement to be changed after the fact and behind the
buyer’s back?
Posted in books
Tags amazon, buyer, contract, marketplace, seller
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Posted by Tom Moertel
Tue, 30 Jun 2009 02:57:00 GMT
I recently purchased a Kindle DX, mainly to read PDF documents that contain math and comp-sci formulas. Still, I couldn’t resist the temptation to try out the instant gratification of purchasing a “Kindle edition” ebook, so I ordered a sci-fi novel I had read as a child, Alan Dean Foster’s The Tar-aiym Krang.
The Good
The purchase and download via the ever-so-branded “Whispernet” wireless network went without a hitch. The Kindle DX, itself, was great and made reading easy. The text looked good, the navigation seemed intuitive. There was just one problem.
The Bad
The production standards of the content destroyed any chance of convincing me that I was reading something akin to a real book. I found numerous typographical errors, something that just doesn’t occur in real mass-market books, which have been subjected to professional review after typesetting. By far, the most common error was the substitution of a left open single quote for what should have been an apostrophe, an error that I don’t think Amazon missed an opportunity to make. For example, when shortening computer to ’puter:
The brilliant fix (no need to thank me, Mr. Bezos)
So, if you’re Jeff Bezos, you’re probably wondering what you can do to improve the quality of Kindle edition books. After all, you spent all that time, effort, and money on the Kindle itself, getting the look and feel just right, crafting the perfect book-reading experience, even insisting upon seamless “Whispernet” downloads to encourage impulse purchases of Kindle editions. You certainly wouldn’t want the content owners, the lovely folks who supply you with typo-ridden source documents, to undo all that you have worked so hard to achieve with the Kindle, to destroy the immersive, luxurious reading experience that you are so close to delivering, to unweave the spell that convinces readers that the Kindle is just as good as – if not better than! – a real book. Somehow, you must fix the content problem, but you know, you just know, the content owners are going to screw it up for you.
So, here’s what you do, Jeff. Let the content owners screw it up – you know that’s what they’re going to do, anyway – and fix the errors yourself. How? With an army of focused, motivated proofreaders: your customers!
Seriously, this idea would work miracles for you, Jeff. You know how the Kindle lets you make annotations to the Kindle editions you read? Just extend those annotations to include corrections. Then when those annotations are saved to Amazon’s servers, extract the corrections, combine them with the corrections from other readers, maybe verify them with a quick third-party review (a perfect job for the Mechanical Turk, wouldn’t you say?), and then automagically distribute the relevant, approved corrections to every Kindle reader who could benefit from them. Further, to make your readers happy that they found mistakes in the Kindle editions that they purchased, offer them a bounty, say 25 cents, for the first report of each correction found.
In one fell swoop, all your problems with production quality are fixed:
- customers who find errors are no longer angry but happy
- most Kindle editions will be corrected quickly, ensuring a blemish-free reading experience for the bulk of your customers
- even if the content owners give you garbage for source documents, and even if they won’t allow you to change those documents one iota (they are pretty controlling, after all), you can still deliver perfection to your customers: apply corrections on the “client side,” correcting the pristine, yet error-filled source material, on the fly, right in the Kindle itself
And there’s one big bonus I didn’t mention. This capability would make Kindle editions better than real books. Not just marketing-copy, in-theory better, but really better. As in, now we have a compelling reason to switch from paper: to get the benefits of collaborative, peer-augmented reading and correction, in which each reader’s contributions enrich the reading experience for all who follow. Think about it, Jeff, it’s a big deal.
No need to thank me.
Posted in reviews
Tags amazon, bezos, books, kindle, peer, reading, review
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Posted by Tom Moertel
Sat, 07 Apr 2007 16:20:00 GMT
When Amazon.com announced its its Unbox video-download service, I was skeptical. Compared to the reigning champion – the DVD – Unbox looked like a loser:
- Unbox burdened its customers with DRM and the annoyances that come with DRM
- Unbox required the use of a Windows-only player application
- Unbox movies lacked “standard” DVD features such as surround sound, alternative audio tracks, commentaries, and bloopers
The first two points were deal-breakers, so I wrote off Unbox and did my
best to ignore it.
And then Amazon hooked up with TiVo. Beaming movies directly into my
TiVo box eliminates the need to deal with DRM and Windows annoyances.
My two big concerns sidestepped, I decided to give Unbox another
look. I still wouldn’t want to buy Unbox-to-TiVo movies because
they lack the typical DVD extras and would tie up storage
space on my TiVo, but Unbox might be a decent way to rent the
occasional movie – if the price were right.
Is the price right?
That depends on how the price of Unbox compares with the price
of my current rental option of choice, Netflix. Both services offer immediate
access to good movies: Unbox by on-demand downloads, Netflix by
ensuring that I almost always have a DVD or two in the house.
To compare Unbox with Netflix, I had to figure out how much a
rental costs me with each service. With Unbox the figuring was easy
because each rental has its own price tag, typically $3.99.
With Netflix, it’s a bit trickier because the rental price depends
upon how many DVDs I rent in a month. I pay a monthly fee of $17.99
and can rent as many DVDs as I want, at least until the infamous
Netflix rate
throttle
kicks in.
To determine how
many DVDs I rent during the typical month, I had to download my
rental history. (If you’re a Netflix subscriber, you can get your
history from the Returned
Rentals page.)
After downloading my history, massaging it into the desired form, and
loading it into R, I generated a
stem-and-leaf plot to visualize the number of DVDs I have rented
during each of the 76 months I have been a Netflix subscriber:
> stem(monthly.rental.counts, scale=2)
The decimal point is at the |
1 | 0
2 | 000
3 | 0000000
4 | 00000000000
5 | 000000000000
6 | 000000000000000
7 | 0000
8 | 000000
9 | 00000
10 | 0000
11 | 0
12 | 00
13 | 00
14 | 00
15 | 0
It looks like I have rented as few as one and as many as fifteen DVDs in a
month. Most months, however, I rent between three and ten DVDs. On
average, I rent about 6.4 DVDs per month:
> summary(monthly.rental.counts)
Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3rd Qu. Max.
1.000 4.000 6.000 6.408 8.000 15.000
Thus my average rental price is about $2.80 per DVD:
> 17.99 / 6.4
[1] 2.810937
Now I can make my Unbox-vs-Netflix price comparison. For me, it
looks like Unbox is about 40 percent more expensive than
Netflix:
> 3.99 / 2.81
[1] 1.419929
So the price of Unbox is not right, at least for me.
Testing Unbox-to-TiVo rentals
Because Amazon is offering free $15 credits to TiVo owners, I decided
to give Unbox a test drive. My test rental was The Illusionist. Renting the movie was
easy (just one click), and shortly thereafter Unbox automatically
downloaded the movie to my TiVo box. When I played the movie,
however, I was disappointed with the video quality. I easily
noticed banding artifacts, which were distracting
at times. On the whole, the viewing experience was inferior to watching a
DVD.
Netflix still beats Unbox
For me, then, Unbox is still a loser. It costs more and delivers
less than DVD rentals via Netflix.
A note to my friends at Amazon.com
I would be happy to give you my business, but right now you’re not
earning it. If you
want me as an Unbox customer, here is the recipe for winning me over:
- Let me easily download movie rentals to my TiVo. (Check.)
- Offer true DVD quality or better. (You’re not there yet.)
- Sell the rentals for less than $2.80. (You’re not there yet.)
Until then, I’ll have to give my money to Netflix.
Cheers,
Tom
Update: edits for clarity; added tags.
Posted in reviews
Tags amazon, dvds, movies, netflix, rentals, reviews, tivo, unbox
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Posted by Tom Moertel
Thu, 03 Aug 2006 05:34:00 GMT
Amazon.com recently launched Amazon Grocery by offering a $10 discount on purchases of $49 or more. I took the bait.
Amazon’s plan
Judging from Amazon’s initial grocery offerings, I suspect their
plan goes something like this:
- offer only goods that can be warehoused (no perishables)
- undercut traditional retailers on high-margin goods such as organics, naturals, and upscale brands (e.g., Annie’s Homegrown, Bob’s Red Mill, Newman’s Own, and Tom’s of Maine)
- offer a greater breadth of products than traditional retailers can stock (the long-tail play)
- offer customers free “super-saver” shipping to eliminate shipping as a customer concern
- sell products in bulk-quantity packs to reduce Amazon’s internal shipping costs
Prices and bulk packs
For pricing perspective, I grabbed the receipt from my most-recent
trip to Giant Eagle, the local grocery store.
Generally, when both Amazon and Giant Eagle offered the same product,
Giant Eagle priced it significantly higher, in one case more than
twice as high. For example, here are four items from the receipt:
Amazon sells the first three products in packs of 12; the last
product, in packs of 6. For the Mac & Cheese and Red Hot Blues chips,
I don’t mind the bulk packaging at all: my family goes through this
stuff quickly. The last two
items, however, I probably won’t buy from Amazon. We don’t
eat them fast enough to make storage practical.
Test run reveals flaws
Tempted by the $10 discount offer, I placed an order with Amazon
Grocery. Here are the products I ordered:
- Bob’s Red Mill Large Flake Nutritional Food Yeast, 8-Ounce Packages, Pack of 4 – Yes, I actually like this stuff.
- Coomb’s Maple Syrup, Premium Grade B, Organic, 32-Ounce Jug – Grade B refers to darkness, not quality, and Grade B rules: its mightier maple flavor blows away the comparatively wimpy Grade A. (Amazon’s price was $13 per quarter-gallon, which is actually a better deal than the $28.55 I paid for a half gallon of organic Grade B when I last ordered from an online supplier.)
- Annie’s Homegrown Organic Shells with White Cheddar Mac & Cheese, 6-Ounce Boxes, Pack of 12 – My wife loves this mac & cheese, and the boxes are small, so a 12 pack is just about perfect.
Today, the order arrived.
There was one mistake. Amazon sent me the whole-wheat version of the mac & cheese, when I had ordered the regular version. Oops.
It was easy to see how the mix-up happened. The box that contained the 12 pack was clearly labeled by the manufacturer as “organic whole wheat shells & cheddar.” Here’s a photo:
But somebody at Amazon had applied the wrong bar code to the box:
(The & that escaped from the Land Of XML is a nice touch, too.)
Mislabeled as it was, the whole-wheat 12 pack was just waiting to cause
problems for a customer like me.
Is Amazon taking Grocery seriously?
When I called Amazon about the order mix-up, I was curious about how
they would handle it. Amazon Grocery is a complex new offering, and
there were bound to be mistakes. The only question was whether Amazon
was prepared to correct the mistakes in a way that made me feel
confident in getting what I ordered if I were to purchase groceries
from them again.
In this case, they did. When I told the customer representative that
I had been shipped the wrong box, he said that he would put in a “reorder”
for the correct mac & cheese and send it to me via next-day shipping.
As a bonus I could keep the 12-pack of whole-wheat mac & cheese
that had been mistakenly sent to me. I doubt a typical grocery
store would be so willing to eat the cost of its mistakes.
When I told the rep that the box I had received had been mislabeled at
the warehouse and cautioned him against repeating the mix-up by
sending me another mislabeled box, he said he would make a note of my
concern. He also said – and I found this very interesting – that
Amazon’s policy is not to take action until they receive two complaints
about an item being mislabeled. (I hope there is some math behind
that policy.)
Will I receive another mislabeled box? Time will tell.
Update 2006-08-04:
As promised, Amazon sent me a replacement
package, which arrived the next day and contained the correct product.
Cautious optimism
All in all, I’m upbeat about Amazon Grocery. Amazon stocks many
products I can’t find at the local grocery store, and where there is
product overlap, Amazon seems to offer a compelling price advantage. No,
Amazon won’t replace regular trips to the grocery store, but it
probably will change my buying habits for the products that
grocery stores routinely mark-up through the roof. I can’t
see that as anything but good.
Posted in reviews, food
Tags amazon, eagle, giant, groceries, shopping
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