By Philip Tan Boon Yew
I have been an Amazon customer for three years, and have bought a
variety of items from the store. The site does not hesitate to let
me know that it has built up a profile based on my earlier purchases.
Yet, there is something strangely comforting about Amazon's growing
knowledge of my tastes and preferences. The constant presence of Amazon's
'Recommendations' and the ability to see 'Why was I recommended this?'
exposes the inner workings of the profiling in layman's terms. The
'Page you Built' use same mechanism based entirely on the pages you
looked at during a single session.
Amazon uses all this information to recommend products to customers
with similar tastes. The transparent, automatic tracking lends Amazon's
Recommendations an air of credibility, while the more common Customer
Reviews are often informative but laced with unreliable subjectivity
and opinions. It helps to know that 'Customers who bought this title
also bought' other specific titles, conjuring a reliable list of accumulated
votes made by customers' wallets.
When it comes to community, the Listmania feature is more entertaining.
These Top Ten lists, assembled by Amazon customers, are often useful
when comparing similar products. More often than not, kooky lists
such as 'Bands with names that sound like kitchen appliances' are
highly enjoyable distractions. Occasionally, you run into a familiar
name, driving home the reality of the pervasiveness of the Amazon
community.
Amazon succeeds with these customizable features work for Amazon
simply because everything else works well. From the zippy search speeds
to the clean visual design, the Amazon experience is all about selling
you as much stuff as quickly as possible. It has a thriving, unabashedly
capitalist community in the very best sense of the word, and Amazon
is one of the strongest examples I have found against the claim that
the Internet discourages traditional impulse buying and browsing-shopping.