I have recently read an article which brought an interesting dilemma to my attention. A husband bought his wife a surprise gift (a Tom Tom GPS device) on Amazon, but the surprise plan was backfired by the company’s ingenious automated marketing system. The couple shared an iGoogle homepage which allows multiple widgets/apps to be displayed simultaneously on that single page. On the iGoogle homepage was a Gmail widget which displayed a headline preview of the most recent emails from the husband’s Gmail account. The wife noticed the headline of an email sent from Amazon to her husband, and it didn’t take long before she realized what she was going to get for Christmas.

This dilemma shouldn’t be so much focused on who is at fault, but rather Amazon and marketers should ponder on what changes can be made to prevent similar events from happening in the future.

Eliminating Amazon’s automated product recommendations is out of the question, but how can it be altered to accommodate to consumers wishing to purchase surprise gifts without having any negative affect on the system’s upsell ability?

I think customers should be given the ability to opt-in to opt-out of specific upselling opportunities. This means that consumers should be able to browse on an e-commerce website such as Amazon with full confidence that their browsing history will not have any affect on their future experience on that website. However, this “stealth” mode must be limited; otherwise, it would defeat the purpose of having the automated marketing data mining system which would result in millions of loss in revenue. One possibility is to offer the “stealth” mode only during holiday seasons. Another possibility is to delay the product recommendations during holiday seasons until the holiday is over. A more plausible idea would be to include a special button displaying the words “Holiday Shopping” on the e-commerce landing page. Clicking on this button prior to window-shopping on the Internet will disable the website from displaying any product recommendations. To ensure the usage of this button won’t be misused or overused, it will be available only during holiday seasons and each click will only allow a 30 minute timed session of stealth surfing. A warning message can appear 5 minutes before the session ends.

Dec 19th by admin