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A View From Under the Long Tail
An anonymous reader writes "Here's a funny article by James Boyle in the Financial Times on what it really feels like to be part of the long tail economy." From the article: "Where Amazon's normal customer service seems to be run by suspiciously cheerful MBAs from Stanford, who break off from counting their stock options to write apologies and deliver refunds, 'Amazon Advantage', the ironically named system for selling wares, is clearly based on the last days of the Soviet system. The problem with their representatives is not that their native language is not English, it is that their native planet is not Earth."
This is not really an indictment against Chris Anderson or his most excellent work on the Long Tail concept so much as it is a demonstration of Amazon's lack of infrastructure (or management) in their Amazon Advantage program.
I've heard from more than one person of their frustrations in dealing with this program which has lead me to delay efforts to publish a couple of items through them...
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Where Amazon's normal customer service seems to be run by suspiciously cheerful MBAs from Stanford, who break off from counting their stock options to write apologies and deliver refunds, 'Amazon Advantage', the ironically named system for selling wares, is clearly based on the last days of the Soviet system.
well, with any service, there are going to be different tiers depending on what sort of customer you are. Obviously, direct Amazon customers get the top-level customer service. However, it doesn't make economic sense for Amazon to provide that same-level service for customers of a low-volume third-party-vendor selling their goods on an Amazon storefront.
I'm not saying it's "right", I'm just saying it makes sense.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
I've worked in publishing for 15 years. Producing the books has never been easier. Delivering the books to customers is now the hardest part. If you publish yourself, if you sell any at all (which is a whole other story) you end up with cartons of books in your garage and spend your days packing and posting and processing credit cards and cheques. Companies like Amazon earn their 55% by dealing with that. But Amazon, while admittedly the 800 lb gorilla of the online book market, is far from the only choice despite what TFA says.
Dear Amazon
Because of your piss-poor service I have not bought anything from you for two years. I use your website to find books and then go to my local English bookstore to place the order. DVDs are obtained in a similar way by browsing your site and then walking round the corner to my local video rental shop. I am sure that I am not the only person who does this.
Ed Almos
Budapest, Hungary
The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. - Tacitus, 56-120 A.D.
What's really happening is that it adds some trust to the equation.
Take a random web site that wants to sell a book. You don't know if that book will actually show up, or if they'll just take your money and vanish. You don't know them.
Enter Amazon. You know that if you buy something from Amazon, you'll get it. You have confidence in them. Of course they sometimes make mistakes. I remember when they sent me the wrong book, but it turs out it was an interesting book so I read it anyway. But you know they won't just take your money and run with it, and they'll take the book back if you don't like it.
The big advantage Amazon has is aggregating shipping costs. Say I find a small vendor who's selling me a book for $15. They tack on $ 5 shipping and make it $20. I can find that book at amazon for $12.50 and buy it together with three other books for $8 in shipping. So my shipping overhead per book is $2 instead of $5, and I got the book for a little less, too. That's a huge win for me and makes it far more likely that I will buy your book.
This phenomenon is why the person in the article is still dealing with Amazon. Buying a $15 book for $20 is prohibitively high overhead, at least for me. Buying a $15 book for $14.50 ($12.50 + $2 shipping) sounds a lot better. And I know I'll get it, usually pretty quickly.
The truth is, it's better than ever to be a small producer of books or seller of merchandise thanks to Amazon and eBay's trust mechanisms, which are effective in spreading a bit of the trust the big guys have to the little guy. That's a huge advantage to bring the little guy.
Would you want to turn back the clock to the days before Amazon? Odds are that your small publishing company wouldn't even be noticed. Amazon and eBay help link you with your customers, and that's a huge advantage over the way things were before.
After all, nothing's stopping you from opening your own online bookstore. You just won't sell as much, or make as much money. And it's a huge distraction from the core business of writing and publishing books, which surely is hard enough without adding the complexities of sales to the equation.
D
A small press is pretty much guaranteed to lose money on Advantage, 'cuz you have to pay for shipping, etc. yourself to Amazon, then give the standard 55% discount, and there's no way of predicting needed quantities.
What most indies do (admittedly, not Duke law professors), is say "screw it" to the Advantage program and sell themselves through marketplace.
In my lifetime I've met one person who was happy with Advantage, but he was a famous man who has since died...