Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

I’ve been ordering stuff from Amazon.co.uk rather frequently.  I never had any problems with any of the products or deliveries.  Until my last order.  For some reason it just didn’t come.  And because it was a DataPost delivery, it couldn’t have been tracked either.

So, when all the dates for estimated delivery passed, I emailed back to Amazon asking them if they have any information about that order.  They told me that they haven’t, but if the order won’t arrive in the next few days (they gave me a specific date), then I should just let them know and they would resend it free of charge.

The date they mentioned came and went but the order still wasn’t here.  So I waited for another couple of days and asked Amazon again.  They emailed me back and said that they will place a replacement order within the same day.  A few minutes later they confirmed that the replacement order has been placed, and just wanted to know if I still want all of the items, since one of the DVDs that I had on the list changed status from “In Stock” to “Usually ships within the next 4-6 business days”.  I said that I don’t mind about more delay and would rather just get all of the things that I ordered.

And that was it.  Two weeks later the re-placement order came in.  And now let me state the obvious: I am a really satisfied happy customer.  My respects and thanks go to Amazon for handling the situation the best way they could.

P.S.: A few days after the replacement order arrived, the original order came too.  Very much delayed, but it came through as well.  Because I am a greedy bastard, and because those DVDs are just so good, and because Christmas is almost upon us, I won’t be sending one of this orders back.  I’ll keep both of them.  But I will for sure order more, a lot more from Amazon.  Thank you, and an early Merry Chrismas.

Via this CyberNet News post I got to Zoomii.com.  There is a saying about all new being well forgotten old.  And that’s exactly what Zoomii.com is about.

There is something magical about walking through a bookshop - touching books, flipping pages.  Especially, when you don’t know exactly what are you looking for.  Amazon has sort of taken it away.  You get in, get your stuff, maybe grab something that is recommended nearby, and leave.   Zoomii.com combines the best of both worlds.  You can still get stuff from Amazon shop at Amazon prices, but instead of visiting a rather cumbersome interface of their site, you can browse through a familiar bookshelf area.

The combination of a good design with intuitive interface makes it almost a “Wow!” site fo me.  It took me exactly three seconds to figure out how to use it.  And even if I wasn’t tech savvy, there is a little friendly popup that appears when entering the site, which tells briefly how to navigate around.  The control panel on the left is small, and has only the things that I care about - navigation, category selector, and information about my cart.  Brilliant.

The only thing that I wish Zoomii.com had that it doesn’t have (or at least I couldn’t find) is the option of choosing which Amazon shop to buy from.  If I could buy directly from Amazon.co.uk, it would be a 10 of 10 web site.  Hope, they will add this option later.

Sites like this should be taught to web designers and developers.  This is how the web should be - clean, simple, efficient, and intuitive.

I found this list of most harmful books of the last two centuries via Alex Exler’s LiveJournal. Of course, the harmness of the each book is very subjective and depends on who are the judges. Also, interesting to note, that although books are considered harmful, each entry has a link to appropriate Amazon.com page.

I myself flipped through a couple of books in this list while I was a teenager. Now I am more interested in reading them, but I don’t have any copies around.

Finally, my order arrived from Amazon. My wishlist has been updated accordingly. This time I ordered a couple of books by Ansel Adams and few DVDs.

For some reason, customs office repackaged the shipment into a bigger bag and didn’t specified my full address. I had to go to the main post office and after a number of explainations and tricks, get the package there. Surprised? I guess not.

I’ve came across a new search engine from Amazon.com today - A9.com. It looks and feels much like Google, which is used for web searches anyway, but there are a couple of interesting bits about it.

First, if you’ll create yourself an account, A9 will remember you previous search queries. Nothing new here, though. While most of search engines don’t do it, most of the browsers do.

Secondly, it is possible to see “Site info” for each search result, where some specific information can be found, like contacts, description, etc. The weak side of it is that this information must be submitted by a human and is not generated automatically.

It is also boasted that A9 has some “Search Inside the Book” ™ technology which you can use to find text in Amazon books. I didn’t have any piece of text in mind at the moment, so I couldn’t test if it works or not.

The last nice thing I’ve noticed about this search engine is that it is very easy to operate by just using the address bar of the browser. That means that direct queries are easily constracted. For example: http://a9.com/leonid%20mamchenkov.

People who work with Amazon.com a lot will probably find this search engine handy. Me - I don’t like the peachy colors.