Amazon, one of the leaders in innovating the customer experience has, redesigned one of its few failures, the gold box. You may remember a combination of bizarre recommendations, “you only have 60 minutes to decide” and “pass forever” . Well I kept trying it and it continued to be totally irrelevant, which was surprising considering Amazons investment in personalization, collaborative filtering and recommendations.
So what’s new and improved, well first it actually displays things you might be interested in, second, it displays two similar things side by side, somehow giving an illusion of choice. See my screenshot of the two information architecture books (Lou, if you reading this I already have the polar bear book), which rather begs the question, why won’t Amazon let me say “I already have this, show me something similar”.
According to my contacts at Amazon, the original Gold Box was designed intentionally to *not* show you relevant purchases. The idea was that it was to introduce you to product lines that you *weren’t* familar with.
For example, if you did most of your purchasing in books and music, the Gold Box might introduce you to products in jewelry, tools, and toys. Amazon didn’t care if you bought items in the gold box. My contacts said that people exposed to the Gold Box were more likely to venture into one of these other categories for an eventual purchase.
I was told it was taken down due to architecture/implementation constraints.
The fact that it’s returned showing more relevant stuff says that Amazon is taking a different approach to broadening their product lines.
Thanks for a little inside perspective Jared, it’s funny you mention jewelry, as I remember the old gold box used to show me an awful lot of necklaces
It seems they have swung in the other direction, in my last gold box I had two books on information architecture and two book on customer experience marketing/management. As I had mentioned the new gold box is so relevant now, that it is recomending quite a few things I already have.
One of the problems I had with the original gold box was that it showed me items that I could not make a good value judgement on, a necklace with $20 off being offered to me as someone who didn’t shop for jewelry made it an unlikley purchase. The new side by side comparison seems to be an interesting way of giving the the customer a way to interprit the value they are being offered.
I assume this tool may have 2 purposes :
> help amazon get rid of stocks
> be the “beta version” of a more ambitious CRM item. But for the moment, as you may not enter preferences or interests when subscribing, it does not seem to be very likely. Maybe someone else will take the initiative.
Basically, it is not a bad idea. Not relevantly applied though. I wonder if they will send me an e-mail if they have something for me, or do I have to make the effort of browsing the site ?
Worth optimising.