Amazon, I love ya.
Amazon Prime is a fantastic program. Once you’ve paid your Amazon Prime fee, two-day shipping is free for a year. Not having to worry about shipping fees means that I buy a ton more stuff. What’s that?
Tara Calashain has a new book on
Information Trapping? I just buy it on impulse now.
Amazon, my affection for you means that I’ll give you some feedback for the low, low price of free!
- I like certain authors (William Gibson, Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, etc.). I’ll basically buy every new book from about 7-10 different authors. Give me a better way to track new books from a favorite author. At one point in the past I created Amazon email alerts for new books from a few specific authors, but then you started sending me emails for “related” authors. As far as I could tell, there was no way to get alerts about new books without getting the unwanted “you might also like this author” emails. If you let me watch specific authors, I’d buy the new John Brockman book from Amazon instead of stumbling across the book in a bookstore.
- While you’re at it, provide an RSS feed for that “new books by this author” info instead of as an email. C’mon, I can get an RSS feed for that funky Gold box feature but not for my favorite authors?
- My bank just sent me a new credit card because “security lapses have occurred involving … a retail merchant where you recently used your card.” Never mind that my bank doesn’t tell me which retail merchant had the security lapse; that’s a whinge for another time. But now I’m doing the “go to places that have my credit card and change the credit card number” dance. To make a long story short, I click on “My account” and the first thing I see is “Change payment method” so I click it, but it takes me to the “Open and recently shipped orders” screen. That link is quite poor/annoying. I’d 1) change it to say “Change payment method for an order”, or 2) change the UI of the page to make it clear that “Change payment method” and the “Where’s My Stuff?” section is visually different from the global payment settings, or 3) make the link go to the right place. The right place is a screen to actually change the payment method for an order. In fact, out of the 14 links in the “Where’s My Stuff?” section, eight of them take me to the exact same page. Fix that.
- Deputize an Amazon blogger to stop by and give some feedback on posts like this.
- Okay, leave aside the UI advice from point #3. I can delete a credit card, but can’t add a credit card without ordering something? From an Amazon page:
Note: if you’d like to add a completely new credit or debit card or update a debit card issue number, you need to wait until the next time you place an order. On the “pay” page, select the radio button below “Or enter a new card” and enter the full card details. You can then use Your Account to delete any out-of-date cards.
Paypal and Google Checkout let me add a new card in seconds, but I have to go and find something to buy before Amazon will let me add a new card? That’s really bad. Let me add a new credit card without ordering a book. Can any Amazon person explain to me why this is?
If this stuff annoyed me, it probably annoys other people too. I’m an Amazon fan, so someone stopping by and saying “we’ll looking into it” is half the battle, but fixing some of this stuff would make me happier with Amazon and let me spend more money at Amazon. Heck, I’m thinking of trying out
Amazon’s S3 storage service to make an offsite back-up of my blog database, so if someone at Amazon would let me know that they’re
listening and responding, it’s more likely that I’ll try other Amazon services. That leads me to my bonus feedback, which is:
6. Make Amazon’s S3 storage service
compatible with scp from a Unix command-line. It’s a storage service. Why should I need to study
code samples in Python or Ruby? If you make it “just work” on port 22 where ssh/scp hangs out, backups would be so much easier. Lots more people would use it, not just
smart, technical people who are willing to code neat hacks.
The S3 team already did a smart thing by making it possible to
host public web images on Amazon’s S3 service. Not offering scp effectively hampers the growth/uptake of the system. Why would Amazon want to do that? The only reason that I can think of not to allow scp uploads is maybe Amazon wants to host higher-value data, e.g. data belonging to startups, not become the mass backup for the world. But if that’s the issue, Amazon could still offer scp-upload storage at a slightly higher cost. Anyway, I’m thinking out loud now. C’mon S3 team, add scp support. Amazon, lemme know if I’m wrong about anything or if any of these suggested tweaks come true.
Anyone have other suggested tweaks for Amazon?
Five tweaks Amazon needs to make - Read More...
