I have a friend that worked in Amazon for a while. He told me that after outages are repaired, there is a spike in sales but that it is never enough to cover the loses. The revenue does just disappear.
I wonder if this says a lot about immediacy and consumerism. Do people go elsewhere or does time permit them to realize they don't really need/want what they were about to buy?
Impulse purchases at the click of a mouse have really changed the way I personally consume. Anyone aware of any studies on the impact of instant feedback?
I find that interesting because Amazon is a "no impulse buy zone" for me. Everything I buy there is meticulously planned. It is probably an effect of living in Hawaiʻi - shipping can kill a good deal very quickly (and Amazon, while I'm at it, you know where I live - stop telling me that the item is free to ship when it isn't!).
I'm working in Antarctica and everything takes at minimum 3-4 weeks to arrive (often 6) after ordering, so it's really taken the starch out of impulse buys.
Amazon doesn't deliver most physical things to my (current) home, so all of my purchases are Kindle (impulse) buys. I'm guessing that for a lot of international readers the Kindle Store is the most important part of Amazon.
An reason I used to use to stop that behavior in myself was "oh, it will take a few days to get here". It's difficult to use that logic these days. If one day Amazon could get it to me in an hour without extra fees I'm in trouble.
It's too bad they haven't expanded faster - Walmart just barely rolled out their curb side pickup service where I live - if Amazon had made it here with same day delivery even just a few months ago we'd be customers for life, but as it is we'll probably stick with Walmart for groceries even when Amazon does eventually get here. (better the devil you know, etc.)
So, just for one point on a graph... I didn't really need the Star Trek salt and pepper shakers and Star Trek ice cube trays that I bought last night. If Amazon search had been down last night instead of this morning, it's a safe bet I wouldn't have bought them.
could be even worse. On the Internet it's not like some corner store you can check later, as it's still just as convenient next time: everything is a Google search away. So everyone who goes through the trouble of figuring out where else they can buy from - might just end up as those other people's customers for good!
I'd be curious to see the numbers on that sort of thing. I know for some people that is the case, but i almost feel.. locked in to Amazon. With free 2 day shipping, and decent customer service if i have problems/etc, i am not likely to shop elsewhere.
Is it a strange indicator that this feels more like lockin to me, than loyalty? I have no idea what that means.. or how to change the conceptual impression.
> Is it a strange indicator that this feels more like lockin to me, than loyalty?
My hunch would be that your subconcious is telling you loyalty towards a huge faceless corporation feels weird. If it was a local store with people you could connect your positive experience to, my guess is you'd have no issue calling it loyalty, even if that store was part of an equally big corporation.
That may be an accurate hunch. I feel loyalty towards Costco, because i hear good things about their employees and know multiple people who want to work there.
With that said, it's hard to say if that's because i hear good things, or because it's a physical store with people i see.
Compare that to Amazon, and i rarely hear good things about their staff treatment. Despite having a good experience with Amazon. .. to be clear, i just don't hear good things.. not implying that i hear lots of bad.
I'm up to about 65/35 loyalty/lock-in. It's almost like I keep expecting them as a faceless BigCo to fuck something up and piss me off ... but they never do. The very few minor issues I've had with orders they've resolved beyond my expectations. It's .. hard to stay mad.
This is in stark contrast to many other faceless BigCo's that I've stopped using entirely, or only use out of necessity but loathe every interaction with. (eBay, PayPal, Comcast, Verizon, etc.)
Having just recently bought from a couple other places online for the first time in a while, I'm not worried about Amazon losing customers long term. I had forgotten what it was like to have your package take a week and a half to get to you. If I was another e-commerce store, I'd be very, very worried about competing with Amazon's logistics machine.
How many people actually do this though? I rather wait for them to be online instead of registering my card information someplace else. I can buy stuff from almost any site as long as they accept Paypal but many want to store the card information themselves, understandable from their perspective but not from mine.
Impulse purchases at the click of a mouse have really changed the way I personally consume. Anyone aware of any studies on the impact of instant feedback?