01 February 2003

Paper on Weblogs: Here comes Section 2: Collaborative Filtering As I promised, for every single day a section of my paper will appear here. Figures are omitted and editing is nowhere to be found yet. Just the raw facts, folks. Here comes the second section: Collaborative filtering: one of the same or marketing from the market’s perspective?   [1,466 words]   In a thorough study of the leading e-tailer, Sandeep Krishnamurthy (2002) chronicles Amazon’s business evolution and attributes its success as a bookseller to a wide spectrum of factors, most important of which being that Amazon turns its inventory faster than bricks-and-mortars, has reduced the book return rates, passes on cost savings in the form of cost reductions to consumers and enables unknown authors - ‘outsiders’ – to reach a global audience. But most crucial above all, in Krishnamurthy’s view, is Amazon’s vision: to become Earth’s most customer-centric company and biggest store; essentially a “platform on which you can do a lot of things” as Amazon.com’s founder, Jeff Bezos puts it (Hof 2000).   Amazon has not revolutionalised the bookselling industry because it offers such a vast collection of books, many of which are cheaper than at high-street bookstores. Neither because it has laid the ground for cross-selling opportunities by deploying highly sophisticated CRM technologies which track and record every single customer click. What is so special about Amazon.com is that it invites readers to send reviews of books and to rate them on a five-star scale along with a commentary expressing their thoughts and opinions on the book. Authors have the right to reply and other reviewers can comment on how useful the review was to them but they cannot change the review.   READ MORE 11:11:47 AMSay it loud  []