I got this via email this morning. First of all, let me assure ALL of you that they had ZERO reason to believe that I would want to buy an Enya CD. There is nothing in my CD collection that I would class as anything remotely like Enya.
Recommendations on the whole are a great idea. Amazon’s return on investment for their reco emails must be massive — I certainly am usually prompted to buy something when one arrives. Often not what they’re recommending, but something nonetheless.
This time, however, the recommendation has gone seriously wrong … I’m not encouraged to buy anything. I mainly just feel insulted!!
Posted by Meri @ 10:17 AM on November 7, 2005
Comments (7) Permalink
Comments (7) Permalink
November 7th, 2005 at 10:42 AM
I had a similar problem with Amazon as a result of buying a birthday present for Elly: Amazon has now decided that it will pester me with every new video, DVD or item of memorabilia for Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Just goes to show that computers can be really good at being really dumb really fast.
November 7th, 2005 at 2:30 PM
Normally it’s not too bad — I learnt very quickly (after having had my recommendations royally SCREWED by an ex with a penchant for Madonna and crappy business books) that you can mark things as “Do not use for recommendations”. What concerns me is I’m pretty vigilant about that and it still tries to sell me ENYA!!
November 7th, 2005 at 3:08 PM
If you go to the website’s Recommendations section, it’s likely that Enya will turn up somewhere in the list, along with a “Why was this recommended to me?” link. (Unfortunately, I’ve yet to click one of those and see “Ever heard of GIGO?” as an explanation…
November 7th, 2005 at 8:52 PM
Perhaps the problem is that you’ve bought everything good they could think of, so now they’re reaching. 😉
November 8th, 2005 at 11:23 AM
Guys i’ve also had problems with amazon thats why i’m doing an honours project on the usability of e-commerce sites like amazon so if you have any other issues about amazon, ebay or any other e-commerce site i’d like to hear them so i can tear these sites apart during my project. You can email me at giggsy1000@hotmail.com
November 8th, 2005 at 11:39 AM
Scott, I did try, but it doesn’t appear to be there. Maybe it’s just a blanket email and they’re lying about the past purchases.
Jeremy, you are probably right! I do have rather a lot of stuff that comes via Amazon. I usually use it for all my Xmas shopping as well — saves me actually having to go into a shop!
Ryan, I don’t think this really counts as a usability problem: more a recommendations glitch. On the whole I rather like Amazon, even if the interface isn’t the best in the world. As I understand it, Amazon do a lot of A-B testing, so they are refining their design a lot based on performance, but dont revisit the original core design.
I think you could probably have a field day with Amazon or eBay, but I think the important thing is that they are usable enough that millions of people use them. So it might be better to focus on the learnability of the design — I think that is the key to their success.
November 8th, 2005 at 6:33 PM
The possibility that they’re lying (sorry, ‘casting their net a little wider than normal’) shouldn’t be discounted, Meri — looking back through my inbox, the recommendation emails I get usually specify the basis for the recommendation on the mail itself, rather than just an innocuous “you’ve bought similar artists” comment.
It’s remarkably similar to a mail I received a couple of weeks ago from a recruitment site, saying “here are the results of your saved search for Sales positions under £30,000”. Now it didn’t match any saved search I had, but it did make me log back on to the site and check (thus validating my login details, and bumping up their uniques for the month). Sneaky — so I unsubscribed soon after.