Amazon.com; Detailed Analysis of Virtual Community Implementation and it's benefits

Essay by glengem December 2003

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Amazon.com's primary focus on capturing internet customers by best serving them by tailoring the customer's buying experience with a dynamic list of recommended buying purchases. It does this by matching his/her search queries and stores those locally on cookies for the server to refer back to when looking for recommendations to display at the user's interface. Its seamless and innovative.

Amazon.com provides a community discussion board that lets people review products and share them with the rest of the community according to their experiences giving the buyer a better opportunity to make an informed decision. Registration is required to post but casual browsers can read and take full advantage of the community reviewers' review of the product. These discussion boards are easily accessed when a person is browsing through a product's page and can scroll down to see the listed comments of product reviewers who either bought the product from amazon.com

or from another place and was either satisfied or not with the product and rates it from a scale to one to 5 stars along with detailed reason for their rating. The written review is much more valuable because it illustrates what exactly what the person used as a criteria to rate the product. The person viewing the site can judge from his/her self whether the criteria used to judge the product quality was objective enough to be credible. Also, another hidden benefit gained from this virtual community is being able to see what features of the product don't exactly work as advertised and doesn't get publicized by the retailers or the manufacturers. This feature is also access at the bottom of the page in the feedback section.

The featured recommendations feature called "so you would like to ..."of the site featured on the bottom of the scrolled product...