This post is based on my most recent shopping experience at Amazon.com. I observed a few nifty things in Amazon shopping experience which generally go unnoticed, but are truly brilliant when given some thought.
#1 I was shopping for this product X online which comes in four colors. I found the product on Amazon.com and saw different prices based on the color. Basically, you pick the color on the product web page to see the corresponding price. The price on Amazon keeps fluctuating sometimes every few minutes during holiday shopping season. The products on Amazon are either sold by Amazon or by an external vendor who has setup shop in Amazon marketplace. The price of the product and the color i was looking for was $Y initially and dropped within a few minutes to $Z. And, within a minute was temporarily out of stock but Amazon offered to ship it when available. So, i immediately checked out and placed order. This took a minute or two. After placing my order, i went back to the product page and found that the same product and color from an external vendor filled the page with a different price because Amazon had sold out it's stock. There are two things to note here:
- Amazon despite being out of stock honored to ship it because i was already on the page
- When Amazon had good amount of backlog after running out of stock, it quickly started displaying the vendor who had the product in stock.. all in a moment's notice. That speaks for the super-efficiency of this ecommerce portal. This may seem trivial, but from a business standpoint having an empty shelf is the worst thing to happen. Amazon keeps the shelf stocked all the time so not to loose it's customers. That's really good for business.
#2 I had some questions on this product and posted in the product Q&A page. Within a few minutes, i had a customer respond to my question. And, more answers were flowing in within an hour to my email. That was really fast response. Two days later, there were more and more responses, but Amazon unsubscribed me from the flood of responses automatically and sent me an email asking if i was satisfied with the answers. I was about the unsubscribe given the first few responses had answered my questions. Amazon just did it automatically saving me time and surprising me in the process. Brilliant!
