As we head into the holiday shopping season, we’ll all acquire horror stories about crappy retailers or web sites. In an effort to spread some pre-holiday cheer, I give you three reasons I love Amazon.com:
$1 Buys My Love
1. Two weeks ago, I pre-ordered a copy of Kung-Fu Panda as a Christmas gift for my daughter (she can’t read yet so I’m not worried about spoiling the surprise) and this week, we received it. No, that’s not why I love Amazon. It’s their job to mail me the stuff I pay for.
I love them because in addition to sending me my order, they sent me an email telling me that the price had been lowered by $1 since I placed my order, and they were crediting my account.
In high school, when I worked at a Target store, they had a price adjustment policy: if you bought something and it went on sale within a certain number of days, you could bring in your receipt and get an adjustment. I was always stunned that people were paying that much attention. I wondered if they monitored every receipt, or if they just happened to notice that something had gone on sale. Either way, what a pain in the ass to have to return to the store with your receipt to get your money.
I love that Amazon took the initiative to let me know the price had gone down. Frankly, I hadn’t noticed, I would never have noticed and they could have easily kept my dollar. Presumably, a lot of people pre-ordered this movie which adds up to a lot of dollars that Amazon could have held on to. Instead, they used technology for good, gave me my dollar back and they won my heart. Yes, my love is for sale at the low price of $1.
Universal Wish List Button
2. When I was pregnant with my daughter, I wanted to create an online wish list for baby gifts. At the time, there was no one place where I could create one central wish list for everything I wanted. Some stuff was on Amazon/Babies R Us (which were, at the time, combined. Babies R Us has since gone off and created their own separate site), and other stuff I wanted was on natural parenting web sites (like, cloth diapers and the like). I was forced to create separate lists on separate sites which was a pain for everyone involved. Same thing when I got married.
Enter Amazon’s new Universal Wish List button.
Oh, yeah. Now you can add anything from any web site to your Amazon wish list. Christmas this year is gonna ROCK!
MP3 Daily Deal
3. I used to buy most of my music from iTunes. The DRM drove me crazy (especially since I have two old laptops that are still “authorized” to play my iTunes library even though I don’t have them anymore. Grr!). Not only has Amazon started selling DRM-free MP3s, they have an MP3 Daily Deal: a bargain-priced album that changes daily. My husband bought me the new Keane album the day it was released for $2.99. Today’s album is a new release by Taylor Swift for $3.99. If you’re as excited as I am about expanding your music collection without spending tons of cash, you can check the web site daily, or follow Amazon’s MP3 Daily Deal on Twitter (though for me, the tweets haven’t always arrived on time — I can’t tell yet if the problem is my Twitter app or them. I also can’t tell if this is an official Amazon Twitter account. I think not.).
And that concludes the three reasons I love Amazon. My bonus fourth reason: I don’t have to deal with parking.
So, who do you love?
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