Sunday, December 30, 2007

Amazon's mis-step

I have always been impressed by Amazon.com’s ingenuity in simulating (and improving) the bookstore experience online – how you can look into sections of the book, browse the index, read reviews, find similar titles, etc.

A message today from Amazon.ca tells me their system is out of whack. All you need to know is that a few weeks before Christmas, I bought a book for my wife of photographs of Muskoka, the cottage-country region just north of Toronto.

So today Amazon tells me that:

We've noticed that customers who have purchased or rated Muskoka Souvenir by Judy Ross or other books in the Photography > Architectural category have also purchased Institutional, Limited Edition: Photographs of Jails, Schools, and other Chicago Buildings by Judith Russi Kirshner. For this reason, you might like to know that Institutional, Limited Edition: Photographs of Jails, Schools, and other Chicago Buildings is now available. You can order yours at a savings of 37% by following the link below.

Does this make any sense? Decide for yourself.

Muskoka:
Chicago Jails











P.S.: The Chicago book retails for $250. No wonder they're trying so hard to move it!

1 comment:

Ryan said...

My guess is it's a pair of relatively low volume books - since Amazon runs on statistics it's probably not hard to skew their reccomendations.

I'm also going to go out on a limb nd guess that there system gets a little wacky this time of year because Christmas. The vast majority of their customers are likely buying stuff for other people and making all kinds of strange, random associations between products...