Amazon has offered a “Subscribe and Save” features for quite a while now where customers receive a discount if they’ll agree to automatically purchase a given product on regular intervals. This feature seems to be most common among grocery and household items that people tend to repurchase regularly.
I’ve been meaning to try this for some time, but doing so proved trickier than I imagined. Why? Because I haven’t put much thought into how often I restock products around my house.
Amazon’s grocery items seemed like a good place to find something to try. However, Amazon tends to sell grocery items in bulk, so rather than projecting when you’ll run out of an item you need to project when you’ll run out of 6-12-24 boxes of something.
But then I found Wheat Thins - something that you can almost always find in my house. Amazon sells them in 6-packs, and offers a 15% discount if purchased through Subscribe & Save. The longest time period for Subscribe & Save is 6 months, so as long as I can make it through one box of Wheat Thins a month, this should work out well.
I price shopped this and it looks like I’ll save around $0.80 per box, or $9.60/year on this cupboard staple vs. buying it locally.
Now I want to scale this to other products. Any suggestions?
One of my biggest complaints in the past about Amazon’s Prime shipping membership was that it was too difficult to filter Amazon’s inventory for products that were eligible for free shipping. What good is a free shipping program if you can’t figure out which products quality and which are shipping from 3rd parties?
This doesn’t only effect Prime members. Anyone who’d rather buy from Amazon directly benefits, including people like myself who are sick of receiving print catalogs from Amazon’s 3rd party suppliers after buying something through Amazon. Stop that.
Now, what do we have here from the left margin of Amazon:
A link that filters search results for Amazon.com’s own inventory: the product eligible for Amazon Prime. Nice!
A delicately worded link that does exactly what I was looking for.
Problem solved.
I think one of the most misunderstood thing by businesses analyzing Amazon’s business model is the balance between quantity of inventory and the quality of their merchandising.
Yes, Amazon sells a ton of stuff. In fact, the site has over 53 million pages indexed in Google, and it’s safe to assume that a large number of those pages are product display pages. Impressive. And clearly, just by carrying products in your inventory at a fair price you’ll manage to move some product.
However, it’s not the quantity of inventory but the quality that sets it apart from other online retailers. It’s not enough to carry a product in a world where your competition is only a few clicks away. This is where Amazon excels. They do such an incredible job with merchandising that they’ve become the default place for researching consumer from books to diapers.
This is a quick list of 50 product page features I see on the Canon SD870 Digital Camera product page:
1. Original price
2. Current price
3. 5 photos
4. 43 Customer uploaded photos
5. Link to related products by same manufacturer
6. Delivery time information.
7. A discount offer.
8. 31 different retailers selling this camera in addition to Amazon
9. Gift Wrapping option.
10. Option to sell your own camera through their site.
11. Bundling of accessories: battery, tripod, SD card.
12. Links to what people ACTUALLY bought after checking out that camera.
13. Links to compare cameras
14. Links to similar items.
15. Camera specs
16. Product details
17. 198 customer reviews
18. Sales rank of product
19. Date camera was first listed for sale
20. Option to update product or image information
21. Manufacturer’s product description
22. Other variations (different color in this case)
23. Add to Cart options for many related accessories and service plans.
24. Display of 45 other products people who bought this product purchased.
25. Categories this product falls within
26. Ads for other sites selling this product.
27. Tags that help define this product.
28. Option to rate the product or signify that you already own it.
29. Syndicated review from DPreview.
30. Graph illustrating how this camera has been rated by other customers.
31. Product reviews
32. That are also reviewable and sorted by their usefulness.
33. Option to create your own review.
34. Video reviews.
35. Customer review search engine.
36. Links to communities within Amazon that are interested in related subjects like Image Stabilization.
37. Links to 50 discussion topics related to this camera.
38. Link to add article to amapedia.com for this item.
39. Link to buy product on external website.
40. Links to lists customers have created that include this camera.
41. Links to Guides people have created that mention this camera.
42. Links to categories this camera falls within.
43. Links to other product categories on Amazon.
44. Ads that take people away from Amazon (but make Amazon money)
45. Feedback links, including links to help update the product’s information.
46. Links to Order tracking and account information.
47. Links to shipping and return policies.
48. Links to Gift card and help departments.
49. Links to previous browsing history.
50. Links to preview searches.
It’s no wonder why people spend so much time on Amazon and why they convert visitors to closed transactions as such a high rate.
Of course, this isn’t to say that all 50 of the above items are required to succeed in online retail. However, it’s good to have a feel for where the bar has been set today. Your customers are almost surely familiar with what online shopping CAN be like based on a previous experience with Amazon, so be ready to compete with that experience.
I think one of the most misunderstood thing by businesses analyzing Amazon’s business model is the balance between quantity of inventory and the quality of their merchandising.
Yes, Amazon sells a ton of stuff. In fact, the site has over 53 million pages indexed in Google, and it’s safe to assume that a large number of those pages are product display pages. Impressive. And clearly, just by carrying products in your inventory at a fair price you’ll manage to move some product.
However, it’s not the quantity of inventory but the quality that sets it apart from other online retailers. It’s not enough to carry a product in a world where your competition is only a few clicks away. This is where Amazon excels. They do such an incredible job with merchandising that they’ve become the default place for researching consumer from books to diapers.
This is a quick list of 50 product page features I see on the Canon SD870 Digital Camera product page:
1. Original price
2. Current price
3. 5 photos
4. 43 Customer uploaded photos
5. Link to related products by same manufacturer
6. Delivery time information.
7. A discount offer.
8. 31 different retailers selling this camera in addition to Amazon
9. Gift Wrapping option.
10. Option to sell your own camera through their site.
11. Bundling of accessories: battery, tripod, SD card.
12. Links to what people ACTUALLY bought after checking out that camera.
13. Links to compare cameras
14. Links to similar items.
15. Camera specs
16. Product details
17. 198 customer reviews
18. Sales rank of product
19. Date camera was first listed for sale
20. Option to update product or image information
21. Manufacturer’s product description
22. Other variations (different color in this case)
23. Add to Cart options for many related accessories and service plans.
24. Display of 45 other products people who bought this product purchased.
25. Categories this product falls within
26. Ads for other sites selling this product.
27. Tags that help define this product.
28. Option to rate the product or signify that you already own it.
29. Syndicated review from DPreview.
30. Graph illustrating how this camera has been rated by other customers.
31. Product reviews
32. That are also reviewable and sorted by their usefulness.
33. Option to create your own review.
34. Video reviews.
35. Customer review search engine.
36. Links to communities within Amazon that are interested in related subjects like Image Stabilization.
37. Links to 50 discussion topics related to this camera.
38. Link to add article to amapedia.com for this item.
39. Link to buy product on external website.
40. Links to lists customers have created that include this camera.
41. Links to Guides people have created that mention this camera.
42. Links to categories this camera falls within.
43. Links to other product categories on Amazon.
44. Ads that take people away from Amazon (but make Amazon money)
45. Feedback links, including links to help update the product’s information.
46. Links to Order tracking and account information.
47. Links to shipping and return policies.
48. Links to Gift card and help departments.
49. Links to previous browsing history.
50. Links to preview searches.
It’s no wonder why people spend so much time on Amazon and why they convert visitors to closed transactions as such a high rate.
Of course, this isn’t to say that all 50 of the above items are required to succeed in online retail. However, it’s good to have a feel for where the bar has been set today. Your customers are almost surely familiar with what online shopping CAN be like based on a previous experience with Amazon, so be ready to compete with that experience.
I’m a huge Amazon fan, but as I mentioned earlier, I have my doubts about the Kindle ebook reader. Here’s an example of why I think Amazon has some doubts about the Kindle too.
Check out the pricing examples for current NY Times bestsellers compared to hardcovers. This comes from the Kindle page of Amazon’s site earlier today:
Three popular books. All for more than 60% below the hardcover price. Impressive, right?
I don’t think so.
If Amazon wanted to give a more HONEST example of Kindle ebook pricing, they would have compared the Kindle book prices to what those NY Times bestsellers cost in hardcover form on their own site.
It turns out that Amazon sells brand new hardcover versions for $16-17 for the titles mentioned above.
This is a significant difference, because it more than doubles (almost triples) the number of titles one would need to purchase before one breaks even on the Kindle.
Also, notice that the current USED price for the title mentioned above is only $2-6 below the NEW price. In theory, this means you could buy a new copy and sell it to someone else for a net of half of the Kindle. You can’t sell - or even give your Kindle version to a friend.
The audio CD version of Colbert’s book, which costs more new than the Kindle or hardcover version, IS reselling for $4 below retail, so also a better value play.
So, while there certainly are reasons why someone would buy a Kindle, I’m ruling out the cost savings as one of them.
I have a weakness for eReaders. I don’t know why, but I think they are a really nifty technology. You may have seen me swinging one around from time to time in a video using it as a very expensive notepad or prop. When Amazon announced their Kindle product I jumped online and used my Prime account to get one the very next day ($3.00 overnight shipping is awesome).
There are a lot of things I like about the Kindle and a few things I simply don’t understand. The video below covers a lot of these items. Keep in mind that it’s nearly impossible to have a great in-depth review of a product with only 12 hours of use. I do plan on using the Kindle for a while then re-shooting the video with my actual real-life experiences.
There are many odd things about the Kindle that I didn’t cover in the video, but have been mentioned online many, many times before. Why is there DRM, how do I share books, page refresh is slow (on all ePaper I have ever used the refresh is slow), so forth and so on. I’ll play with the device for a bit, hopefully have a chance to talk with a product designer or two and get back to you with some answers as soon as I can. For now, enjoy the video.
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