Amazon.com : Java Glossary

Introduction

Amazon.com is an enormous online bookstore that carries many Java related books. If you visit them by clicking on the logo, I get a 5% commission on any books, tapes or CDs (Compact Discs) you buy. The main disadvantages of shopping this way, is, if you elect standard ground shipping, you can wait 4 to 10 weeks for delivery and you can’t peruse the entire books. The main advantage is the huge selection. If you click the logo, you will be taken to the store. Amazon also sells electronics, DVD (Digital Video Disc) s, food and magazine subscriptions.

Advantages

• Amazon is huge. They have pretty well any recently-published book in stock.
• They have warehouses in many countries. This means shipping costs are lower. Shipping is faster and there are less hassles with cross-border shopping.

Disadvantages

• The thing they do that drives me insane with rage is sell the same product under half a dozen or more different ASIN numbers, each with a different price and each with a different availability.

  This means it takes six times longer to make a purchase trying to track down the best deal. For me, the problem is magnified a hundredfold, since I have to do this for every product I refer on my website.

  Often, each country store uses a different ASIN number. This means, for my website, I have to to look up ASIN numbers separately for each country.

  If you ask they have products in stock, they tell you about the stock only under that ASIN number. If it is out of stock, they will not tell you about the stock under alternate ASIN numbers.

  I wrote them twice about this trying to make a business case for desisting. The first item the ignored me, the second time they said it was more convenient for them to do it this way. I agree, but there are win-win ways to handle it. Because they have so many partner resellers who actually ship the item and because they negotiate different deals with each one they need to keep track of all the different prices and availability. However, nearly always this detail is of no interest whatsoever to customers. They just want one part number, one price, one story about availability and one set of features. The Amazon databases should merge the information to provide customers with the same simple view that smaller retailers offer. At the very least, you should be able to find all this trivia with a single unique unchanging ASIN number.
• No PayPal. They accept only credit cards. I don’t have a credit card. For many reasons I would never consider getting one, much less using it for Internet transactions. Credit cards are a joke when it comes to security. Using credit cards is less secure than Fedexing Amazon a box of signed blank cheques. It least let me pre-pay by cheque or money order. The will not let me use Interac on my credit union bank account either.
• They are so huge, their monopoly power is putting brick and mortar bookstores out of business and other online bookstores. They are behaving more and more like WalMart every day, bleeding the book publishers.
• The website offers one set of products and their AWS (Amazon Web Services) database offer another set. Sometimes they agree on products, features, prices and availability. There is no excuse for them to be out of sync. Both are computer generated.
• Their prices are sporadic fluctuating daily and sometimes absurd, ten+ times the going rate, though in general they are reasonable. Obsolete items are rarely discounted; instead the prices are jacked way up. It is though they are trying to trick the unwary into massively overpaying.
• They quite often sell obsolete or discontinued items without warning you.
• The prices in the database and on the website rarely agree even roughly. I have complained about this dozens of times. They just say that is to be expected.
•  Unfortunately Amazon has been applying bogus software patents to its competitors. They patented the use of the cookie for e-commerce and have also patented one-click sales and the use of commissioned referring sites. So please use the Bookstores section to find alternate bookstores. You might also follow the boycott link and add your website to it. This is like trying to claim a patent for brushing your teeth or adding up items in a bill to get a total. There is no novelty or art or invention, just smarmy lawyers trying to pull a fast one and hold back commerce on the net.
• In summmary, Amazon is a very big company who does not give a shit about the convenience of its customers.