Product Reviews
The following year after its launch, in 1995, Amazon decided to allow customers to post reviews of books, both positive and negative. At the time, many retailers thought this move was suicidal. Who in their right mind would post negative reviews of their product? As time has shown, it was a brilliant move.
Customers, who could
now study other people’s opinions, began to look to Amazon as a source of information about books worth reading. Reviews at the time reflected a new reality: consumers would not buy a product unless they found a review denmark phone number data about it online. Now, 27 years later, an online store without reviews is considered outdated and untrustworthy.
84% of shoppers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations
Product Recommendations
The “people who bought this also bought” block appeared on Amazon’s website back in 1997. The company hired data scientists to create a recommendation system based on previous purchases, cart contents, reviews, and other customers’ choices. One of the first was AI expert Andreas Weigend:
I had weekly meetings with different people, anyone who wanted to. In the evenings with beer and pizza, we would just study the histories of visits to the site to understand why people actually do this.
Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon
After implementing recommendations, sales increased by 75%. Since then, personalization in e-commerce has reached a new level thanks to machine learning. But here’s the interesting thing: in 2017, in honor of its 20th anniversary, IEEE Internet Computing decided to choose the publication that has best stood the test of time. It was the 2003 article “Amazon.com Recommendations: Collaborative Filtering from Item to Item.”
One-Click Checkout
Amazon patented the 1-Click Checkout technology in 1999. Back then, e-commerce was just emerging, and the company itself was still primarily an online bookstore.
Imagine: the Internet appeared less than ten years ago, and for many it was still too the ultimate guide to cell phone number complicated. Even advanced users preferred to buy things the old-fashioned way. They had to be convinced that doing so on Amazon was as easy as going to a bookstore. And Bezos, who has made customer service a priority since the company’s founding, reduced the formalities to a minimum.
During the first visit to the site, a person only needed to register and choose a payment method. And then buy anything in one click. The method is so ingenious that Bezos decided to patent it.
In 2000, Apple received a license to use the technology on its website thailand data and in iTunes. And on September 12, 2017, the patent expired, and by that time many retailers had already developed their own analogues of 1-Click Checkout. Now it is difficult to imagine a modern service without one-click purchases – especially considering the number of orders from mobile devices, where this is critically important.