Lady Gaga's $0.99 Album Download Overwhelms Amazon
mashable.com
mashable.com
ps: I'm not a big Lady Gaga fan, but for 99 cents I figured I'd give it a whirl.
> However, the damage has already been done, as users are meting out one-star ratings in droves, most of which deal with Amazon’s slow service as opposed to the quality of the music (although some reviews in the lower bracket did dub the disc “disappointing”). As a result, the album has a relatively low three-star rating.
Can't Amazon allocate some resources to find a decent fix to this? It doesn't exactly make it desirable to use their platform.
A review of an album should be confined to your opinions on that album.
That being said, most people don't know the difference as I see this kind of thing on Zappos and NewEgg all the time.
I don’t think there are easily discoverable and public review sections for the services Amazon and other online retailers provide†. Are there gaps in the selection of products? Are prices appropriate? Is the shipping slow? Is the packaging inappropriate? Are you given inaccurate information about the arrival of you orders? Are songs slow to download? Is the user interface wonky?
There is no place for consumers to publicly review online retailers on their own websites. That sucks. It makes product reviews less useful because they are riddled with all that noise that is in no way related to the actual product. It also doesn’t allow consumers to review online retailers in a way that’s accessible to other consumers. This is a failing of the online retailer, not consumers.
I think online retailers are quite happy that all the talk about their services is spread around in all the product reviews and not in any central place. They can even delete criticism of their service with the justification that the review in question is off-topic.
It’s not even as though this is a hard problem. You would just have to ask the reviewer what he wants to write about (the product or the service).
†Amazon’s review guidelines (http://www.amazon.com/gp/community-help/customer-reviews-gui...), for example, do not even allow users to publicly share information about or criticize Amazon’s service in reviews. You are asked to use the feedback form which is not public. Quote: “What’s not allowed: […] Feedback on the seller, your shipment experience or the packaging (you can do that at www.amazon.com/feedback and www.amazon.com/packaging)”
Whenever I have a complaint about a Kindle conversion (twice in two years), I try to rate the book based on the author's work -- the text itself -- but make the review title something like "Do not buy for Kindle", but I can see why reviewers might choose to do otherwise: it is, after all, the publisher's product and the publisher's fault for producing a sloppy "printing".
This is "expanding the userbase", and seems overwhelmingly successful.
I've been thinking recently that "sales" (as in specials, temporary price reductions) are a socially acceptable way to do discriminatory pricing (different prices for different people).
You want to do this because some people are happy to pay more (so you want to charge the higher price), and some people will only buy at a lower price. If you price it high, you lose the low people; if you price it low, you can't charge the high people a high price. It makes sense to therefore have offer high prices to high people, and low prices to low people. But people hate this! Amazon actually tried it for a while, until it was noticed (maybe they still do, but in a less discernible way?)
A sale is a way to capture those low people, and only losing some high people. This is apart from getting them to be regular users.
I think it's largely to get people to buy from them instead of iTunes and thus to try CloudDrive and their mp3 service. And also to price discriminate and get people who would have otherwise not bought to buy from them and try CloudDrive and their mp3 service.
EG - no instances of downtime for the regular site / commerce.
Also, I don't know if I get the 20gb for first album purchase (probably not but I can deal with that) or if it will end up in my cloud locker when I accept the 'gift'.
Personally, I found it in a big banner ad on amazon.com/mp3
Also without lots of parameters that might or might not include an affiliate strings.
Please do not post shortened URLs here. It is obfuscation.
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Edit: Oh, also "It appears that you are attempting to use Amazon Cloud Player from outside the U.S. This service is intended for U.S. customers only."
Globalisation it's the future!