BlogAllAlong » Amazon

Amazon Kindle for $189

Bashar — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 17:07:03 +0000

Like it?

Color e-book readers fall this year?

Bashar — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 03:41:33 +0000

Could this happen so soon? Qualcomm is showing off a new colored e-reader that is based on what they call “Mirasol” technology, which they claim draws less power than the e-ink technology, but gives back colors instead, [update] and has no backlight[/update]. Not just colors, but not bad video quality as well.

If anything is gonna drive me away from the Kindle it would be that thing I bet. The new gadget is promised by the fall of this year. Will keep my eyes peeled, and so better you do.

Kindle battery problem caught in action

Bashar — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 13:31:38 +0000

Remember that Kindle battery problem I mentioned earlier? It’s been paparazzied.

Clearly, the Kindle still has about 25% of it’s battery, and it’s complaining about low battery, after which it went almost empty immediately.

Kindle Battery Problems?

Bashar — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 05:35:45 +0000

You know how sometimes you have trouble sleeping? Then you decide it’s dawn already, so you might as well get up and do something useful? You feel like doing early morning reading when house is so quite. You are well into the book, about to wrap it up, and your emotions are starting to flow as you unravel the ending, and as you flip the page, you get a warning battery low message, connect your Kindle to power source!

This is the third time I notice this strange behavior with my 6″ Kindle (2nd Generation). Twice before, I would leave it off for weeks, almost full of charge, and next time I want to read I see the battery already went dead. I tried to mistake my self for it, but today I started reading with battery close to 75%. I was reading for two hours, and when the battery was easily above 25%, all of a sudden I got the battery critical message, preparing to go off. So much for the whole week usage with 1 charge, mind you I always have my wireless connection off! Ironically also, I have just recently updated to Version 2.3 of Kindle, which is supposed to bring in much longer battery life.

One fact is, I have recently added a bunch of books to the Kindle, so one might argue it’s been indexing them. But that explains only part of the drain. What about the previous two failures? And even today, I doubt the Kindle’s been indexing books for 2 hours. At least it shouldn’t be.

So I have two questions:

1- Is the battery supposed to drain while power is off?

2- Anyone else getting the same problem?

For the record, I always recharge through the laptop USB.

Amazon Black Friday Week Starting 23rd November

Bashar — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 21:37:03 +0000

Starting 23rd November, and for one whole week, Amazon Black Friday Deals. I hope I get something good out of it, if I am eligible that is!

9 [Blu-ray] Coming End Of This Year

Bashar — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 08:29:42 +0000

Looking forward to it.

BBC Earth Collection Bluray One Day Amazon Offer

Bashar — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 09:09:43 +0000

The great Planet Earth documentary in Bluray plus Earth: The Biography from BBC is on one day sale from Amazon.com.

All AT&T Phones for one cent with 2-year service plan

Bashar — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 16:32:24 +0000

For one day only from Amazon, all AT&T phones (Why is iPhone not there?) are yours for one cent! But ofcourse the catch is a 2 years contract with AT&T. So it’s US offer, and it’s for people who can sign-up for new plan with AT&T no matter how bad they are.

Amazon Garmin nuvi 885T Goldbox One Day Offer

Bashar — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 08:48:08 +0000

If you’re in the market… this might be a good offer. Ofcourse you will get a US map with it. So for Kuwait you will need to get middle-east map from Seas & Deserts just behind City Center.

UP Available for Pre-Order on Amazon

Bashar — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 09:24:21 +0000

Knowing Disney however, I bet this will take sometime before it’s released. And hey, when are we going to get the previously promised PIXAR movies like Finding Nemo & Monsters on Blu-Ray?

My 2nd Gadget, My Kindle!

Bashar — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 15:58:54 +0000

This is the second part of my shipment I had to fight for last Sunday besides the iPhone 3G S, so you can tell it was a rather big day, and it will be some time before I get any new gadgets. The Amazon Kindle 6”, quite a fascinating eBook reading device that made me dive into the eBook thing few years before I thought I would, and I owe it in the first place to the person who gave me a first hands on experience of it, and secondly to the continuous high pricing of Aramex which made any simple book a heavy purchase. Onn many occasions, I end up paying same or higher price on shipping, than on the book it self.

Now ofcourse thanks to the customs putting their hands on my valuable package, the joy of first hands on touch and opening the package was gone at the cargo place, so this is a reenactment of the box opening.

Here you can see a quick two steps startup guide made available on the screen. I wanted to take off the plastic piece with the instructions, but it just won’t peel off! It turns out it’s the screen content itself, but it looks so real. Thanks to the electronic-ink display technology, the Kindle doesn’t need power to hold up the ink in it’s place, allowing them to write the startup guide on the screen and ship it, adding a wow factor to the first impressions.

Once you follow the steps, Kindle starts loading and then takes you into the Kindle Guide book that comes pre-installed.

A browse through the guide would be of help to know all the features and shortcuts.

Reading Experience:

Compared to regular books, I thought I’d be missing some joy. Once I started really reading using the Kindle, I felt the desire to convert part of my physical library into Kindle if I could. Especially for books with little or no coloring, reading on the Kindle is actually much more easier and eye friendly. Ofcourse, not all type of books might be suitable on Kindle, but great portion of them are.

Kindle books that are sold by Amazon are ofcourse always perfectly formatted for the device. But what about all the PDf files you have? Kindle 6” does not come with native PDF support, and you have to send your document to Kindle via email for conversion. If you don’t want it sent wirelessly to your device (at an extra small fee), you can always send it to @free.kindle.com, and download it to your PC, then send it over to the Kindle over USB connection. So I did few PDF conversion tests, and conversion happens pretty fast, within a minute or two of the upload. One of the books was a rather clean one, another was a landscape one full of colors and have borders on the side, the third was an Arabic PDF book. Here is how it goes.

Kindle – Textmate Power Editing

You can see some partly unrecognizable areas here.

Original – Lessons From Zen Habits

Kindle – Lessons From Zen Habits

Now I didn’t really expect this to pass through, but it actually did pretty well, with some minor issues.

Notice how the left border got converted into a single page by it self. This will come in from page to page, wasting another page flip. But other than that, it’s all neat and clear, and I can enjoy reading it using the Kindle. The Kindle even identifies the links in the PDF version of the book and are made clickable for jumping from one location to another.

Kindle – Arabic Book

No eBook Reader Is Perfect! Not Yet At Least!

Pros & Neat Features:

Fast Delivery: You don’t have to wait as your book gets delivered instantaneously.
FREE Delivery: After the last price drop of the Kindle 6”, I realized that if I buy on average one book per month, I would most likely be paying the same Kindle price on shipping in approximately 14 months or so. I’ve already purchased three books that account for like 10% of the Kindle price, and one of the books was even listed for $0.99.
Readability: Reading eBooks on the computer screen is boring for many, and eye tiring as well. Great amount of books are also printed in low quality material that ink sticks to your finger while reading. Not the same here. It’s totally clean, and every eye friendly. I won’t be lying if I say it beats reading some physical books I have.
One Place For All: This encourages you to read more and on different topics when you have just small break for instance.
Bookmarks: No longer do I need to twist my page to recall where I stopped last time. No, I’m too lazy to use physical bookmarks.
Notes & Highlights: How often do you read a book, and want to quote part of it? Or you want to write a note to get back to in the future, but you don’t wanna miss up with your precious book? Now you can!
Definitions: Place the cursor infront of the word, and you will get instant definition of the word from Oxford dictionary.
Text-to-Speech: Pretty much better than I expected it to be, my brother thought it’s an audio version of the text not on the fly text-to-speech.
Search: You can search for words or phrases in the book. You can only hope the Index would save you in regular books.
No Glare or Backlight: This is both good and bad. Good to give the Kindle longer battery life, and make it easier on the eye. Bad in that you need surrounding light to read it.

Cons:

Speed: When flipping just to the next page, it really isn’t that bad at all. But say you frequently flip back and forth by few pages to recall on some paragraph. It can get boring here. Also, when moving cursor or writing, it feels like the old ages once again.
Locked: You are kind of under the mercy of Amazon here. Ofcourse you can get your PDF files to your Kindle, but Amazon is controlling the conversion. Also, your Kindle books are locked with kindle. I would hope there is a way to convert them to PDF files and take them with you, but I guess you’re gonna have to figure a way for your self.
No Borrowing: You can’t exchange books with others, unless you wanna exchange Kindles.
Initial High Cost: I already explained how this can become cost-effective with time, making Kindle more than just a book cover.
No native PDF support: Even though, I’m happy with the results I got so far.
Lose One, You Lose Them All: Having all books in one device means you risk losing them all if you lose the device, and you will have to buy a new one to get your books back.

Harry Potter 1-5 DVD or Blu-ray One Day Deal

Bashar — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 11:11:06 +0000

Either on DVD or Blu-ray for $56.99! Frankly the DVD collection looks much more fancier though.

Garmin 200 Series Price Drop at Amazon

Bashar — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 01:33:03 +0000

I would personally recommend you keep an eye on the Amazon daily Gold Box offer till you catch a better offer, but see if the price drop suits you.

Amazon Blu-ray Discs Sale

Bashar — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 08:53:38 +0000

Until March 22nd only. Blu-Ray discs for as low as $13.99.

Got me:

March of the Penguins

The Aviator

When We Left Earth – The NASA Mission

Eagle Eye

Tip for Amazon: Measure twice, cut once!

Bashar — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 15:13:33 +0000

So which one is it? 12 or 60?

Sounds more boring than Commodore Sierra games!

Not even with the laptop inside should it weight 22 pounds!

Now why would you recommend a 1 star item to me? Is my choice that bad?

This is both sad and ironic. Such mistakes are becoming more frequent by Amazon. Is it data entry error? Is the data coming like this from the source and no double checking is made? The 1 Star rating is a definite bad logical decision to include 1 star items in the recommendation list! I mean who would go and suggest such a thing. I have also had Everybody Loves Raymond series collection sent to me marked as Photo Frame, and a camera lens marked as Jewelery item. Now how bad can this package be if your wife sees it and there is no jewelery inside!

For the sake of God Amazon, we don’t expect such things from you. These are clear obvious errors, but it makes a man wonder about everything else he reads in the specs. Have I not noticed the weight is way too high for the backpack to be reasonable, I was about to cancel the order. At least I hope the weight was wrong!

Amazon “What We Think” Summary Section

Bashar — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 10:18:49 +0000

If you’ve been recently to some of Amazon’s product detail pages, you may have noticed the new “What We Think” box on the right side. It’s a new box for quick summary review from Amazon about the product, listing the good, the bad, and some quick numbers. While this feature is still not always available, when it is, I see it pretty useful for an initial judgment. You will most likely want to look at end user perspective if the product is reviewed well by Amazon, but not otherwise.

The fear of neutrality in the review exists ofcourse, but so far I have not noticed it. Another thing is, Amazon does not seem to be making this review about their own Kindle product. Makes sense doesn’t it?

One Wish List for All – Amazon Universal Wish List

Bashar — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 04:42:02 +0000

The Amazon wishlist is a really handy tool for me and many others, though most people use it for it’s intended purpose, which is let others know what to buy you as a gift, it still remains the easiest place to keep my wish list. Though I personally still believe a bit of Ajax would make it much more easy to use, as it currently is a bit time consuming to manage, it still is better than storing your wanted items in a separate sheet somewhere else.

Now, and I’m not sure really for how long it’s been there, Amazon have improved their wishlist to allow you inclusion of items outside of Amazon site. Basically, you bookmark any page on the web on your Amazon Universal Wishlist, specify the price, as there is no intelligence in it, and add any comments you may like. Not very much advanced universal wishlist I know, but does the job if you’re looking frequently for stuff outside of Amazon.

Outside? So why does Amazon encourage it?

Increased customer loyalty through the added value of service
We’re basically letting Amazon know what are we planning to buy from other shops. I.e., the money that’s not gonna go in their pockets. Have you ever filled a survey where it says if you don’t shop here, where do you usually go? This is pre-emptive type of it. Before you buy, not after. And they know from where exactly. They may setup an ambush for you if it’s a pretty good deal. Naah, just kidding :). But it is providing them with valuable information if people do use it intensively.

What’s better than Amazon Kindle? Sony Digital Reader!

Bashar — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 08:46:58 +0000

If there is one eBook reader that is promising to me right now, it’s this one

It looks fancier, overall bit smaller than Amazon Kindle, cheaper, comes with 100 FREE classic eBooks, and best of all… it’s open. It can be used to view images, unsecured audio, unsecured text books, and for DRM books, you can use eBooks purchased somewhere else than Sony on them, unlike the Amazon monopoly scheme.

I will be keeping an eye on it and see how it goes.

The Google App Engine, Finally an Amazon competitor

Bashar — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 09:01:30 +0000

With more restrictions, and yet more compound solution, as opposed to the Amazon separately offered services that you have to combine, Google App Engine has just recently launched as the first serious threat to Amazon Web Services. It’s a great chance I guess that you get to run your web application on the “same system that powers Google applications”, but Google’s record in providing enterprise solutions does not speak well for it. Other limitations that I didn’t like is having to use Python, while the options are much more open with Amazon Web Services. Also, Amazon web services is giving you the option to use only the parts you need of the service, while Google App Engine is designed so that you host your whole application there. Not something I may want to do until I’m sure about it. I would’ve much preferred something similar to what Amazon is offering. Gives more flexibility, and it also means that I can go with one option, if I don’t like it, I can with some work switch to the other. The service is still in limited version for first 10,000 developers (already taken), and there is no pricing yet for full version. They’re still trying to get feedback and measure performance it seems.

For some more discussion of the service, checkout TechCrunch blog, and if you are interested, you should also subscribe to the new Google App Engine Blog, which surprisingly still has zero subscribers… Including me!

UPDATE: After going through the Google Videos on the new App Engine, I came to know I was wrong assuming it an Amazon Web Service competitor. The thing is, Google is aiming to provide a framework for people to easily deploy their apps without going through the normal deployment procedure hassles, in addition to utilizing and hosting their app on the same framework Google uses. It is not meant (as they mentioned) for doing heavy computation. With Amazon however, you can use their services for doing the heavy computation your normal host would not be able to handle. Google is not meant for this. It’s meant to host your normal application. Google App Engine may be suitable in cases where the app requires to expand in storage capacity. This will become clear when they announce their enterprise app engine packages.

Amazon suggests…

Bashar — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 15:05:37 +0000

I got this weird Amazon suggestion below:

I tried reading it several times and what they are saying is, customers who bought Programming Collective Intelligence also purchased Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide: Making Web 2.0 Work, which is due to be released in 2008! This is either some cheap marketing or they are considering pre-orders as purchases :). Either ways, the book seems worthy of adding to Wish List and keeping an eye on rating. I’m not gonna rush and pre-order it though. It won’t reach here in time anyways!

Kindle Sales Rank on Amazon

Bashar — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 10:15:35 +0000

So Amazon have revealed their hope for revolution of eBook reading, portable reader called Kindle. Ever since the announcement and people have been submitting bad and worse reviews. Most from people who did not even buy it, but just can’t bare the concept of paying $400 for a book reader that if someday breaks, you would lose all your collected books. Currently Kindle has 3/5 Star rating on Amazon after it was 2.5 only. But what about the sales? Amazon are promoting this thing like crazy and so far I haven’t heard a lot about the sales. So let’s check Amazon Sales rank for this item.

Ohhh… It’s # 1 seller…

On Kindle Store! What a nice way to hide sales figures ;). Not sure if it’s intentional or not, but this sales rank is just useless this way.

Kindle is not so great Bezos

Bashar — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 07:15:18 +0000

Just when Amazon announced their new Kindle with strong front page message from Jeff Bezos, and thought they are going to change the way people look at books with their product, soon the Kindle page got flooded with bad reviews that brought it to 2.5/5! A total of 558 reviews as of now. I remember seeing it the first day and I was excited to have one thing for all, looking at the size and posted weight. Yeah I’d buy it I thought. But then the number of bad reviews was so high I said to my self: “This is an old product then! Why the hell are they so happy about it now?” But soon after I realized its all new reviews, and many from people who did not even try it.

But looking at where people are coming from, they do have a point. Several points actually, and I will add one my self also:

Price Tag: This might be something out of their hand, I’m not sure about it. But in the end, you as a consumer are paying $400 for a way to buy and read books. A single non-transferable way!
As I said, it’s only one way of reading. Say it got stolen, broken, or it turns out to be a piece of crap after all. Or there is a new Apple reader in market and you are just crazy enough Apple fan that you have to buy and use it, or you will lose your privilege of being called Apple fanboy. Can you do that? No, not without losing all the books you bought, as all these contents are protected by DRM and are of specific Amazon file types that you cannot move around. Most you can hope for is Amazon will send you new similar copy only working on Kindle. And you will have to wish only Kindle doesn’t run out of business. And, sooner or later, this product will have to be replaced by superior one, only God knows if it will be backward compatible.
You can’t lend it to someone else to read. Also, you can’t resell it.
EDVO network: I am not sure how good and reliable is that but at least in Kuwait it’s not cheap at all.
Listed Book Price: When you enter the market with yet to be adapted technology, and you are adding another variable to the formula with the DRM and content locking to your hardware, you have to be more persuading on the outcome of it. However what you see is that Amazon tries to show the difference between Kindle and List Price as something like $24.99-$9.99 = $15 saving, like The Almost Moon for example. However this ignores the fact that the selling price for the hard-cover book on Amazon is $13.73 only! Thus the saving is less than $4. I’d say it should be cheaper as all my contents there have no guarantee if being immortal. I could lose them all at once.

In the end, I’m just thinking. What if this same exact product had the name iBook (Trademark Jobs don’t steal it as you did with iPhone!). Do you think people’s opinion and reaction would be different? I’d say it must be out of stock already and 5/5 is just not enough for it :).

So much for Amazon Pre-orders

Bashar — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 13:40:10 +0000

For months and months Amazon have been promoting the anticipated Assassin’s Creed video game for pre-orders. Usually, pre-ordering the item means reserving your copy for the release date to receive it ASAP. I did just that, and I even registered to Amazon prime to enjoy FREE 2 day so called shipping. I did that only to receive such a silly email from Amazon saying:

“We wanted to let you know that there is an unexpected delay with your
video game order (Order# 104-3371841-0424220) you placed on November 12 2007 02:32 PST. Unfortunately, we are unable
to ship the product(s) as soon as we expected and need to provide you with a new estimate of when
they may be delivered:

“Assassin’s Creed” [Video Game]
Estimated arrival date: 11/16/2007

We apologize for the inconvenience caused by this delay.”

What? What am I supposed to do with this stupid apology? I sent them an email to clarify why the hell the item is still Shipping Soon (as of yesterday and up till now!). Their reply came simple:

“Thank you for writing to us at Amazon.com.

I’ve checked your order and can confirm that we are currently
preparing it for shipment.

Please know that we dont offer release date delivery for the
item “Assassin’s Creed”.

We still expect to ship it in time for delivery by the date listed
in Your Account: November 16, 2007″

Very overwhelming right? The fact they still claim they (expect) to ship it IN TIME for the date listed in my account. Nov 16! Let’s just review facts here, as they seem to change the shipping date however they like and then refer back to it as evidence. The item was pre-ordered, expected to be shipped on Nov 13. On Nov 14 only, it’s status changed to Shipping Soon. Today, and as I am writing this post right now, it’s still shipping soon. I.e., almost 24 hours and it’s still shipping soon. While in fact, today should’ve been the worst delivery estimate, they are still hoping to make it the best shipping estimate. And since it’s shipping soon, I cannot even cancel the order. I wonder why they listed it for pre-order if they don’t have enough of it.

Also, for me, it’s not only a matter of convenience. I am grouping my items as one shipment for the courier forwarding company to send over to Kuwait. Alas, now I am paying an extra over $10 for the previlige of receiving late shipment. But you know what? I think it’s my mistake I didn’t listen to my friend’s advise about GameStop. I’m just not sure how they will handle delivery to US courier forwarding companies, and international price is high.

[UPDATE]: They did come back to me with a bit long and polite email offering $5 credit. It’s not much, and won’t cover the delay and separate shipment cost as they know and stated it, but what can you do? Fine. At least they admit the problem was from their end this time. The item is out for delivery now. Can’t wait to get my hands on it :)

Testing new Amazon widgets

Bashar — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 14:01:41 +0000

I am playing with some new Amazon Associates widgets that I came across today. These are the new ones to me:

Unbox Video: Lists some videos to play from. Nice feature, but it’s too wide to fit into a blog, and there isn’t large variety of videos. For example, I chose documentaries and biographies, but ended up having only movie films showing. Why? Simply, no variety or it’s still buggy. Both ways I can’t risk showing any type of video on my site.
Slideshow: I love this kind of interactive ad. You can fade in from one item to another. Again, minimum size is 336×280. Not suitable for a blog.
Product Cloud: The typical cloud of words, bigger is most popular. I don’t like that type of ad very much.
My Favorites: This is what I used to list down another list of What I’m Reading. So far, I prefer the old links as they are faster to load and take less space. What do you think?
Wish List: If you want everyone to know your wish list. Not that it’s very different than my Favorite list, but I just don’t feel like letting people in. Ofcourse my wife sneaks on my list from my PC I can do nothing about it :(.
Quick Linker: This might be interesting for some. Installing the widget on your blog/site will enable you to use custom HTML tags for quick associate linking to Amazon like this:
- Harry Potter</a> –> Links to Amazon.com search results page for “Harry Potter”
- My favorite hero</a> –> The link reads “My favorite hero” and points to a search results page for the phrase”Harry Potter”.

Search: On the fly AJAX based search results. Width can fit sidebar of a blog.

As to how is the overall experience with Amazon conversions? Not so great at all. I just have it there become it doesn’t harm for one, plus I want to list my recommended items and guide the site visitors to buying it. What do you think?

Amazon losing it!

Bashar — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 06:14:18 +0000

I spoke before about how I am starting to feel Amazon are overlooking their customers and the quality of customer support is deteriorating. They have not resolved or even replied to my last call on the previously reported problem at all. Their last reply was from someone who did not read, or does not want to read my email. Because he knows it will make sense. This was followed by other several scenarios where I noticed their customer support does not seem to answer your email, but rather pick from a library of templates which suits you most, polish it and send it. Like when I had my Shipping Address modified for just visiting the edit page and clicking back. I contacted them and explained it, I made it clear I did not modify the Address. But they come back and say “Are you sure you didn’t add some characters by mistake?” I already said no. There is something wrong with your application. Least you can do is send it to your technical team.

There is also their shipping speed, which seems to be coming slower for some reason. My brother sent me an email yesterday confirming Amazon awkward shipping behavior. He was buying 4 books with expedited international shipping to Kuwait, which it says to be 8-14 business days. After placing the order however he got the estimated delivery date to be 10th October! He wanted to cancel the shipment but the items were already being prepared for shipping and he cannot cancel the order anymore. This means that the delivery it self takes up to 40 days!. He did another very interesting test. Added new items t his cart and went to checkout. There, he compared the estimated shipping date for standard and expedited. Guess what? For Standard the expected date was 18th Sept – 3rd Oct, while for Expedited (Faster method) it was expected on 10th Oct! How on earth could that happen? He emailed them about the unexpected delay and the case he tried.

Amazon did reply to him, and as I expected, they do not answer your email. I will take snippets from it as it’s too long. But in summary they said “As stated in our help pages it takes “9 to 27 business days”!. But we saw the expedited shipping time to be 8-14 business days. And I have snapshot from it right here.

Why is that? Go to this URL and see. It turns out Amazon has different international shipping estimates for different regions, and for Kuwait which is in Middle-east, it does take 9-27 business days. This means there is a serious bug also with shipping estimate at checkout. When you select a country outside US, it is giving the default shipping estimate and not taking into consideration your country region, thus misleading the customer. I could be in serious need of the item, and 14 compared to 27 business days is a hell lot of a difference. This is a bug that was ought to be also communicated to the technical team rather than replying to the customer with “I apologize if this information was not clear at the time you placed your order.”. This apology does not help a bit does it? It also does not give any indication of error correction.

So now we all agree, regardless right or wrong, the estimated delivery date could be 10th Oct. Why does the Amazon employee says this later on? “I also suggest you to please check with your local postal services since it is possible that they have already tried to deliver your package but were unable to deliver due to following common scenarios…”. For God’s sake you just said it is expected to arrive on 10th Oct. How could you suggest now in the same email that the postal service was not able to deliver it and we were not in Sept yet at time of writing the email!. Another solid proof it’s a cut-and-paste support.

The example of expedited shipping being than standard also was not address. The case does not happen always, but I also saw it yesterday when I tried it with 1 day slower shipping. Now this is something serious that they they should check and resolve rather than juts ignore it from the customer email. How annoying do you think it is when you, the customer, take the time to write long detailed email explaining the problem and giving them hints, while they send you general template email with just little polishing, and ignoring the facts and bugs you’ve put? You don’t expect that from Amazon do you? Well, recently I expect a lot of this kind from Amazon. They have literally lost my faith in them.

Amazon starting to overlook customers?

Bashar — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 08:23:07 +0000

This is really strange and new experience with Amazon I faced recently. I always say buying from Amazon is more safe than buying from the store downstairs. This time, it was not the case. I ordered video card from a reseller, TigerDirect and since they don’t ship international, I had to ship it locally to my local courier address in US, Aramex. What Aramex does is basically give you a virtual P.O. Box in the US. You simply ship it to their US Address and add a short code after the name to indicate it’s meant for you, like shown below:

/ KWI
147-29 182nd Street
Springfield Gardens, NY 11413
Springfield Gardens, NY 11413
United States

This is very normal people use it in Kuwait all the time. However this time the shipment never came to me and they sent me delivery notification! I checked and found out TigerDirect have shipped the item to the address without the code KWI … They trimmed it and sent it. I contacted them to explain the problem and they replied with the the Thank You we shipped it to this address:

147-29 182nd Street
Springfield Gardens, NY 11413
Springfield Gardens, NY 11413
United States

Yes I know! That’s what I was trying to say. Incomplete means wrong address as far as I am concerned. And since Aramex (as they explained) receive the shipments as whole packages they have to sign and accept it, they can’t check each individual item. I said what the heck? Those TigerDirect people don’t know a thing about customer service. Amazon TO THE RESCUE! They replied and explained they will wait for the shipment to return for the refund, and advised to place a second order if I am in a hurry. OK I said. So what? I placed the second order directly from Amazon and got it.

Now it’s more than 45 days and still no money refund. Few emails went back and forth between me and Amazon, until their buyer-guarantee@Amazon.com replied and said the shipment was delivered and signed, we can do nothing to help! What on earth are those people talking about? The shipment was sent with incomplete details, you advised to put another order and wait for that one, now you simply walk away with it? I replied with a nasty email and got a (POLITE) reply saying:

“Greetings from Amazon.com,

We are sorry to hear that you have not received your merchandise
from order ###. The seller provided us with UPS
tracking ### that shows a delivery with
signature acceptance. Amazon.com is not able to resolve shipping
problems after delivery. The address confirmed by UPS is the same
as given for delivery. Please note the UPS tracking number above is
different than the one you supplied as yours had a couple of numbers
transposed. We advise you to contact your local authorities if
necessary in order to pursue this matter further. Thank you for
your understanding.”

Read the bold part and see how they admit the shipment was sent with incomplete details, and now I have to contact local authorities to resolve it! Quite contradicting isn’t it? And what pisses me off more is the address they use “buyer-guarantee”. So I place the order through your site, your reseller trims the address and ship it. You advise me to wait and buy new one, then it’s my problem? Aramex ofcourse is a different story, and say they will charge $30 (8.5 KD) to return the shipment, and that I need to get the refund from TigerDirect.

Now, everyone have taken his hands off and I am the only one who lost. I had no choice but to ship the item to Kuwait and now looking for a buyer. How ironic? I replied to Amazon now just to emphasize more the problem is from the reseller, he needs to address his problems. It seems Amazon are overlooking customers, or tend to think reseller problem is not theirs.

No more site reviews on Alexa!?

Bashar — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 09:55:12 +0000

Did you notice that? The site reviews that was powered by Amazon is no more on Alexa.com. Try searching for Google, Expedia or any other site. I could not see the old site reviews we used to see. But why is that? Most likely it’s due to extensive spam issue. But this is sad really. It would have been better to have protective measures than remove the whole thing. You definitely like to see a site review before you buy something from it. I did see high spam ratio however when it comes to certain sites, especially spam ones. People tend to post their site name rather than review that site. A filter on urls would do some job there.

I don’t know of any good comprehensive site-review sites. Alexa was not so comprehensive as well, lacking reviews on many of the sites, but it was still good. Any other good site reviews you recommend?

Amazon Context Links Review

Bashar — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 17:29:14 +0000

Following yesterday post on Amazon Context Link and as per Daniel noted Amazon have fixed the Firefox hanging problem, I have decided to give it a try on a separate page. What I did is simply post a little boring paragraph about me, with the intention to list down some of the item’s I’ve already purchased from Amazon to see how quickly and efficiently Amazon links those items. You can click the link and see how it renders the page. First, the main page is loaded normally, and then Amazon script runs to hyperlink the specific phrases to Amazon related product page. You can feel the waiting time for rendering to happen for this very small page, so a larger page might be troublesome. Below is the page I posted with Amazon Context Link code added to the bottom of it:

“Hi,This is a little brief about me. Mainly in an attempt to test Amazon Context Links. I am a computer software developer, love programming and all computer geek stuff. I usually program in Java, PHP, and right now going into Ruby on Rails. I am also a gamer… without proper time to play all the games I want. My game of all time is no other than Monkey Island. Adventure games is my favorite genre, though for some time we have lacked some real good games. It’s coming back now with Telltale games, Ankh Reverse the Curse, Syberia, Broken Sword and others. Action/Adventure game is another type I love. Prince of Persia and Beyond Good and Evil are what made me Ubisoft fan. As for 3rd person shooter, Mafia is a game that can be as good as GodFather if made a movie.

Away from the computer, if you ever find me, I like reading. There are many great books out there, cheap and so rich and useful. Book about habits of effective people, 7 habits of highly effective people. Don’t sweat the small stuff is another very simple, yet very effective book I enjoyed. Google Hacks and Spidering Hacks are two other books (for geeks) that I enjoyed a lot. If you are into biography, or inspiration, read about the life of the richest man on earth, and how he started an evolution. Bill Gates and the making of the microsoft empire could be the best book i’ve ever read. You learn quite a lot about Bill him self, how he made his fortune, how he made it, and why everyone is out there after him. It is also very inspiring. Bill him self wrote a not so bad at all book about Business running at the speed of thought.”

At the time of writing, the page had four links to Amazon generated automatically only, namely Bill Gates, Amazon Context, Prince of Persia, and Monkey Island. One of which, Prince of Persia, only was pointing where I wanted it. Monkey Island pointed to a book instead of the game, so the script does not have intelligence to determine what kind of content I am talking about. Bill Gates linked to a book other than the on I have hoped for, but that’s OK. You can see however that all the other intended items: Java, PHP, Ruby on Rails, Ankh Reverse the Curse, Syberia, Broken Sword, Beyond Good and Evil, GodFather (Can you believe that!), 7 habits of highly effective people, Google Hacks, Spidering Hacks, and Bill Gates and the making of the microsoft empire, all did not generate any hyperlinks, while most of them are highly rated items on Amazon. I assume it’s intentional not to overload the page with affiliate links, but it’s causing me to lose the items I want linked. 1 only out of the 14 items I wanted was properly linked, another was linked to undesired content. To sum it up, below are the Pros & Cons of the service:

Pros:

- Automatically embed affiliate links in the article without need of manual intervention. Could increase sales traffic.

Cons:

- Slight delay in page final loading time. For large pages, this might be an issue as well.

- Annoyance for end user, as all links open floating window with product description.

- Credibility loss: As users gets used to affiliate links in the site, he will ignore the real related links.

- Loss of desired links: Unless you link the specific desired products to Amazon manually, you may lose your intended links.

With all of this in hand, I think I will stick to manual linking to the items I want instead. Your experience as a publisher or end user on this is mostly welcomed.

Amazon Plog Could Be Useful After all

Bashar — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 18:07:28 +0000

Amazon is a great site, they have great customer service, and wonderful online features. The level of control they bring to the customer is really unique, and their personalization algorithms are really good. Even though I was recommended once King Kong Two Disc Edition because I bought Nero 6! Amazon support were not able to explain it ofcourse, but that’s OK. In general, I do find related useful recommendations. The sad thing about Amazon is that as much as they try to expand, their new services don’t seem to appeal to the public, at least not to me.

The Amazon Prime offer for example is something they promote to me where ever I go in their site, and they even enrolled me for free for 3 months period. I just canceled it right before the period ends. I am trying to find a way to make spending $79 on Amazon Prime membership worth it. I couldn’t. Another interesting, yet impractical concept is the Amazon Gold Box. Special daily offers that are supposed to get you too excited to place the order instantly, however the limited few bucks discount doesn’t overcome the international shipping rates. They tried twisting and changing the way items are presented, but I still don’t think they are doing really great with it. A9.com is another story as well. Few years back they launched it, they started having promotions and discounts for simply doing few queries from it and still no luck it seems. I do credit them however for the OpenSearch format.

Few months back, they started the Plog (Personalized Blog). I didn’t really care so much about it. But today only, I thought of reading the 59 new posts there and the first one was simply useful guide as to how to clean up the laptop from inside. Quite what I wanted. The idea is that publishers write articles that gets sent to people based on their past purchase experience. This feature, if utilized properly and not abused for marketing, could turn out really useful to educate the customer and keep him in link with the publisher. Some however seem to be overly posting just to market their products. The good thing is, you can rate your post experience and decide not to receive posts from specific publisher. I think I should start doing that too. Specially when I am ordering for others stuff I would never browse otherwise! My personalized page looks stupidly unbalanced now.

If you are an Amazon customer, check your Plog and see if you can find something of interest there. Publishers are writing to attract your attention, so you should see something useful about your interests.

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