Category: retail
Amazon Universal Wish List
Amazon’s Wish List has always been a place where people could track their lusted items. Given Amazon’s ever growing collection of offered items, the lists could encompass many different types of desired goodies. That functionality is now even better with Amazon’s release of a browser button that allows the addition of items from any site to an Amazon Wish List. This makes the Amazon-based wish lists the closest thing to an interweb-based universal wish list.
Amazon details how to add the button to your browser of choice and it couldn’t be easier. A stroke of genius from Amazon.
Why offer such functionality? Amazon can look at what people want, where they want to get it from, and how much of it they want. Given the convenience offered by the universal wish lists, many people (including me) will feed Amazon’s market research willingly.
Posted: 08.14.2008Wal-Mart / Sams Club
One of the gifts I received for Christmas was a “valet.” No, I didn’t receive a butler to take care of my every need but I received an organizer my wife ordered from walmart.com. Unfortunately, the screws that held in the etched glass of the valet top missed their intended target, blowing out the side wall of the lid as a result. It needed to be returned, so we looked at the return instructions, and they clearly stated to take the item and enclosed packing slip to any local Wal Mart for a no-questions asked refund.
My wife and I motored down to our local Wal-Mart and after waiting a bit in line, we were informed that they could not take the item back because they didn’t have a record of the price we paid for the item. Fundamentally, Wal-Mart and walmart.com don’t use a centralized database of part numbers (or orders) at the store level, and since the local store didn’t carry the valet, they had no way of telling how much money to refund. After finding a terminal and logging into my wife’s walmart.com account, we were finally able to return the item after showing the store manager the online invoice.
Today we decided to go to Sam’s Club to buy some items we needed for our New Years Eve party tomorrow. My wife has a stack of Wal-Mart gift cards, and I went to the customer service desk to see if I could get them combined into one card as it takes the checker a long time to run multiple gift cards. No dice, they wouldn’t touch them because they were Wal-Mart gift cards and not Sam’s Club gift cards.
Something is fundamentally wrong with how the various units of Wal-Mart integrate. This surprises me as the Wal-Mart companies are able to achieve some of their low prices via economies of scale and increased automation. Evidently, nobody told the stores
Posted: 12.30.2007