Amazon.com's extraordinary emphasis on the user experience drives their continued success

Friday, August 18, 2006 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: Amazon.com, e-commerce, online shopping

I love shopping with Amazon.com. Do you know why this pioneering online retailer is still in business and still doing great? They place such a heavy emphasis on the user experience. They get it right and they understand e-commerce. Many times -- even when I see a product in someone else's catalog or on another website -- I'll leave and go to Amazon.com to see if it exists there first, because I know that if I place the order with Amazon.com, it's going to be shipped on time and I'm going to be able to track that shipment easily through the web. I also know that there will be a very competitive price, if not the best price I can find.

Another thing Amazon.com does very well is that it remembers your shopping cart. If you add something to your shopping cart today and then you go back to Amazon.com four months later, that item will still be there. That's a very smart move on their part, and it's a feature I use all the time. I will often see products that interest me, so I'll put those items in the shopping cart and save them up for one larger order made up of multiple products.

Many online retailers are flat-out incompetent in their use of shopping-cart technology. They will actually delete your shopping cart within minutes if you don't complete your order right away. It's a very simple programming trick to preserve the shopping cart and I don't know why more online retailers don't do it.

Getting to know you

Amazon.com also understands customer profiling without invading customer privacy. In other words, Amazon.com will suggest books and products that might interest you based on the things you purchased already -- yet you'll never get spam or a bunch of junk mail from Amazon.com that's off topic. You'll only get information from Amazon.com that is relevant to you as a customer based on your purchasing behavior.

That's not only smart marketing on their side; it's also a form of permission marketing that greatly respects the customer and their privacy. I think Amazon.com has found exactly the right balance between customer profiling and customer privacy. Personally, I'm very happy with the way I'm treated as an Amazon.com customer.

Superior search

Here's another thing that Amazon.com does very well that most online retailers get wrong -- the search function. Amazon's search function is right on target and it's amazing what it can find just from a few keywords entered into the search box. If you think about it, when you enter a search term, you know that you're looking for a particular piece of information -- such as an author's name, a book title or a DVD title -- but the Amazon.com search engine doesn't know that at all. It has to take a guess based on its inventory to try to find what it thinks you want, and given that the Amazon.com catalog contains millions of products -- spanning categories like home and kitchen, hardware, books, videos and even consumer electronics -- the fact that the search function brings back almost exactly what you're looking for nearly every single time is an impressive accomplishment.

It's one of those behind-the-scenes features that most users don't really value for its achievements. A search function, when done right, sort of disappears into the background and doesn't make itself too obtrusive. You use it, it gives you the results you want, and it goes away -- and that's exactly what the Amazon.com search function does. I can't tell you how many other online retailers have lost my business simply because their search function was flat-out horrible. You type in what you're looking for and, even when they carry that product, their built-in search engine can't even find it. So, if you really want a good-quality search function, then go to Amazon.com. I think it's the best online retailer in the business.

Shopping cart wizardry

Amazon.com's shopping cart is quite a marvel of modern technology. It gives you options that most online retailers can only dream of, such as the ability to group your items into as few shipments as possible, or have them shipped as quickly as possible even if it means shipping them separately at additional cost. That's a wonderful feature and it gives the customer choice of convenience versus cost.

I also love Amazon's prime program, which is a program where you pay a flat annual fee to get free second-day shipping on (almost) everything you order for the next year. I must have saved hundreds of dollars on shipping by now thanks to that program. It's not only a cost-saving feature for users who buy a lot of products online, it's also a great customer loyalty function for them, because now, if I'm comparing two different online retailers who carry the same product, I'm always going to choose Amazon.com because the shipping is going to be free. Most likely, when I buy one product with Amazon, I won't stop there. I usually pick up some other recommended items at the same time.

Amazon vs. J&R

Let me give you a specific example of one case in which I specifically chose Amazon.com over a consumer electronic retailer, J&R.com . I was trying to buy a digital video camera stabilizer called the Steadicam Merlin. Amazon.com listed it for $849, and it said it had only two left in stock. I read that as, "Hurry and order it now." It also guaranteed shipment. J&R.com, on the other hand, said it would sell the product for $799, but they didn't tell me how many they had in stock, when it could be shipped or when I would receive it. The price difference was $50, which is certainly not pocket change, but I went with Amazon.com.

Why did I go with Amazon? Because they gave me the information I needed to have confidence in the fulfillment of that order. To me, $50 was worth knowing that I was going to get the product on a certain day and that the product was really in stock. You see, when an online retailer gets it right, they can actually afford to charge more because they are adding value to the product through supporting information such as inventory statistics, shipping time and even customer reviews of the product, which are, of course, a mainstay of Amazon.com.

By the way, if you've read much of my work, you know that I don't compliment companies very often. In fact, most of my writing is critical of what I see in the world, because I'm really looking for peak performance. I'm looking for examples of companies and individuals who get things right and who succeed at a level that's not typical. When I say that Amazon.com is impressive I genuinely mean it. It's a compliment that the company has earned, not one that it has paid me to say.

In fact, I should mention that even though Truth Publishing is currently signed up as an Amazon.com affiliate, there are no affiliate links in this article, thus there's absolutely no financial incentive for me or anyone at Truth Publishing to say these things about Amazon.com because there are absolutely no affiliate links on this page. This is just an honest review of a company that I think deserves some accolades for doing online retailing right, and I will continue to give Amazon.com the majority of my online purchasing business as long as they continue to offer the products I'm looking for and continue to give me the information that will help me make well-informed purchasing decisions.

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