Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Amazon Is UNFAIR to Procrastinators

I'm a procrastinator, I freely admit. I'm usually fairly optimistic, crediting others with good intentions. But I've just become suspicious of Amazon. In the last few days I have twice gone to their site, put items in my shopping cart, then procrastinated over whether to buy then or wait and find more items. Net result, I left the shopping cart sitting. Each time, when I've come back to the cart to complete the transaction, I've been notified that the price has increased on the items in the cart.

It makes sense for Amazon, at least narrowly. They know a customer is either going to abandon the cart entirely, in which case raising the price doesn't matter, or is going to want to buy on a later date. Indeed, they may even know I'm a customer who often comes back and buys. Customers like me have a psychological investment in the transaction and are unlikely to back out. So it's an easy $2-4 per item for them.

I said "narrowly", because the suspicion immediately causes my customer satisfaction with Amazon to drop. They aren't operating in good faith if my suspicions are true. And the mere suspicion is damaging.

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