Results tagged “amazon” from KPAO

On April 15, 2010, the White House blog published President Obama's and Vice President Biden's tax return. The Obama's earned $5,505,409 (mostly from book sales), while the Biden's earned $333,182. More interesting is that the Obama's donated $329,100 to charity, which works out to be about 6%. The Biden's donated $4,820, or about 1.5%. I've previously blogged that I shoot for a minimum of 3%, so I think Biden is a bit low. Obama is doing well.

But of course this begs the question of where to donate your money. Sure, you could give to the places most do: your alma mater, the arts, medical research organizations, or human welfare. But how about something a bit off the standard 501c3? Something were you don't have to worry about a significant portion of your donation getting eaten up by "fundraising and administrative costs"?

One idea I had is basically a twist on a previous marketing idea I had. If there is a particular book that has ideas that you want to get out there, why not subsidize the distribution? Christians do this for their bible in hotel rooms. Why not do the same with a secular book?

OK, so maybe that level of subsidy isn't possible, but with Amazon and eBay, it is possible to do smaller scale subsidies. Just acquire a bunch of copies of the book you want (maybe talk to a local bookstore about getting them at a discount. I imagine they'd be happy to help). Then price them at or below your cost and wait for the orders to flood in. You now can include your own printed material in the shipment that explains who you are and what you're trying to do. Tell them if they like the book, pass it onto a friend, or get involved in spreading the ideas.

It'd be very interesting if Amazon made things easier by simply taking your money as a subsidy and using it to knock the price of their product down. Of course you'd need a helluva lot of money as the volume they'd sell would be pretty high. There's also danger of people perceiving that the book isn't as good if it has a lower price. It's probably better to have the Amazon price there as an anchor so people know they are getting a deal.

I'd love to hear if anyone does this. Post a comment!

Buying music is so 20th century, right? But hey, I still do it. There's a lot of good yet obscure alt rock and power pop out there, or compilations with the odd song from a favorite artist. And this music simply isn't available for digital distribution.

Amazon is a great place to go to find deals on this sort of music. The used listings can offer some really great deals on these albums. High supply and low demand pushes the price of some of these albums down to 1¢. With shipping, it works out to be $2.99. It's a lot cheaper than a new one, and even cheaper than a digital download (if it's even available). And it's cheap enough to take a bit of a chance on.

I'm also trying to clear out some of my old, unwanted albums. As I was listing them, I noticed something interesting about pricing. For all of the albums I listed, I priced it to be the cheapest one. But then if I checked back an hour later, I'd find someone had lowered their price to a penny below mine. If I lowered mine again, the same thing would happen. Repeat enough times, and it turns into a race to 1¢. Clearly they had an automated system doing the pricing. Even tying them for lowest price wasn't good enough. They wanted to be the cheapest, if only by a penny.

Now that I know the game, let me play it to my advantage. I list my album as in horrible condition: massive scratches that skipped horribly, cracked case, no booklet, etc. Sure you can buy it for 1¢, but do you really want to? Compared to my offering, the other one for 1¢ is clearly the one to buy. So someone buys it. After that copy is gone, the competition for the low price is gone. I can raise my price back up to something reasonable, and yet still be the lowest priced one in the list.

But of course I couldn't just stop there. I then realized that I could be that guy who gets the great deal on a used CD for only $2.99 shipped. All I needed to do was find a CD available by one of these shops that does automated pricing. I list my own copy of that CD for sale for 1¢ with the same unappealing comments, and wait. Sure enough, within half an hour the other seller's listing automatically drops to 1¢. I buy it, then close out my own listing.

A couple of shops that I know do this are Doolicity and  Mister Happy's. I'm sure there are others too. Hope you find some great deals out there on some great music.

I suppose it was about 10 years ago when I told Amazon to close down my account. There was news of them storing and sharing personal data inappropriately, and I got all indignant and exercised my power as a consumer. Yeah! Take that, big corporation! Maybe now you'll learn how to treat customers.

Well, it turns out Amazon does know how to treat customers. Granted, I've had my share of issues with them over the years, but overall they continue to impress me. While they don't always have the best price out there, they do a lot of the time. And when they don't it's pretty darn close. If you didn't shop around and just bought from Amazon, odds are you'd be doing pretty well. Even in a category you know nothing about, if you sort by best-selling (the default) or user ratings, you'll find some pretty good options. (Still, I always check any purchase against eBay and Google Products before buying; you never know…)

Plus the free shipping is simply genius. I know I tend to buy more stuff because shipping is "free". Even though we all know it's baked into the cost of the item. That's ok. Psychologically it works better for me this way. And with Amazon doing it, it puts tons of competitive pressure on the little guys to do the same. In the past week I bought an $8 USB flash drive and a $17 motherboard from smaller shops, and both had free shipping. Love it.

Amazon has even gotten better with the returns process. I did 2 returns over the past year. The first they had me use a pre-paid shipping label. They ended up charging me for the shipping, but it was using the Amazon negotiated rate, so it was really low. And the convenience of not having to go through a whole 'nother transaction was great. The other time I had to pay up front, but they reimbursed me. Apparently they were doing a "free shipping both ways" trial taking a page from Zappos' book.

Amazon Marketplace is great, as both a buyer and seller. I've sold a bunch of books and CDs over the years. The cut they take is definitely steeper than eBay, but it's a lot more convenient. And I've found the liquidity of the market to be a lot higher. You can sell an item faster and for a higher price on Amazon than on eBay.

Amazon MP3 is still my favorite place to buy music. They were the first big player to go DRM-free, and they are the only one to offer 256kbps, as far as I know.

And of course their affiliate program was the first and is still one of the best ways for an average person to earn a little cash on the web (in addition to Google AdSense). I use Amazon affiliate links for the majority of my product and service reviews on Rated Best. It's making me enough money to cover the cost of the domain and hosting.

While I don't use it, the Amazon Web Services have also been a trendsetter in the cloud computing space, and they are enabling a lot of small web startups to bootstrap and not worry about IT infrastructure or scaling.

Lest you think I'm a fan boy, I should point out that I've never had an Amazon credit card, and only signed up for Prime once as a free trial. I don't own a Kindle (and don't plan on buying one), and I think the Gold Box and other time sensitive deals are just BS to get people to buy stuff they really don't need.

That said, overall they have an amazing selection, great prices, good customer experience, and free shipping. And that's why I keep coming back.

There is a whole sub-culture on Amazon where people write mock reviews of outrageous products. The first one I saw was the gallon of milk, which prompted the rather obvious review:

1 star: who the in the world buys milk on the internet?!

And thus was born a new art form: the review-as-entertainment. This unassuming gallon of milk now has over 1,000 reviews, including this nod to Poe. Then other products got the mock-review treatment: the Badonkadonk tank; 1 qt of wolf urine; a $500 audio cable; some uranium ore; a book of random numbers.

But my favorite as of late is the Laptop Steering Wheel Desk. The reviews are funny, but the customer images are the best.

I just bought a TV antenna from Amazon. (The Winegard MS-2002: amplified, omni-directional HD. I highly recommend it for over-the-air HD/digital TV.) It showed up last week, and I promptly installed it on my roof. Yesterday I happened to see  see that the very same antenna — for which I paid $80.28 — was now selling for $58.99 + tax on Amazon. That's a difference of $16.42; a 20% discount.

So I thought I'd just invoke the Amazon Price Guarantee and get a refund for the difference. However, I couldn't find a link to it on their site. The reason why? They stopped doing this on Sept 1, 2008.

So I did what any consumer who has a strong sense of justice and is slightly crazy would do. I ordered a new one and returned the original.

Shipping the original back is free, and the shipping on the new one is free, too. It'll be a bit of hassle on my part. But I hope that by doing this — and by blogging about it — Amazon realizes how short-sighted it was for them to drop the price guarantee. Granted, most people who would have used the price match guarantee aren't going to be as extreme as me and do the return + re-buy gambit. But for the few of us that do, Amazon is losing money on the transaction by paying for an additional 2 shippings of the product. And that's my lever with them. Make it less economical for them to allow return and re-buy than to simply refund the difference.

So here's my call to action. If you run into a case where Amazon drops the price within the return window, do what I did. Buy a new one and return the old one. And then tell Amazon about it. I'm putting a link to this blog post on Amazon's Get Satisfaction page.