Today, in the Invent Like An Owner Podcast, Dave speaks with Rebecca Allen. They travel through memory lane by talking about the restructuring of Amazon’s catalog using Base 36, the complications of recycling ISBNs that led to the creation of Amazon’s Standard Identification Number (ASIN), how the Title Authority feature helped customers find books through associations, the seemingly impossible to accomplish Used Books category, and so much more. Rebecca Allen is a former Software Engineer at …
Invent and Simplify
The Story behind ASINs (Amazon Standard Identification Numbers)
During Amazon’s earliest days (1994-1995), CTO Shel Kaphan and Software Engineer Paul (then) Barton-Davis had to write all the software needed to power Amazon.com on the day it offered its website to the world to sell books (official launch date was July 16, 1995). The book catalog was online, and it needed an index (well, it needed several indexes, but that’s another story); specifically, it needed a unique key for each item in the catalog. Because the databases they were using to create the …
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Fixing Errors in the Amazon Catalog
An early task that was assigned to me at Amazon was correcting errors in the Amazon catalog. We built the catalog as a batch job, using two very large databases of books from the book distributors Baker & Taylor and Ingram. The book databases were indexed by ISBN, and were both widely distributed to bookstores, so that bookstores could order books from the distributors. They were not intended to be customer facing. Basically, as long as they were Good Enough for an employee or owner of a …
How Amazon Used Imagination and Technology to Invent for Customers | Maryam Mohit
Today, in the Invent Like An Owner Podcast, Dave speaks with Maryam Mohit. They talk about the different iterations of the early Amazon website that massively improved customer experience. Key improvements included navigation, browse, adding search to the homepage, personalizing the website, adding electronic gift certificates, expanding to new categories and much more. It was all made possible by listening to customers and translating their confusion and input into innovative product …
How Amazon Automated its Google Advertising and Drove Billions in Sales | Blake Scholl
Today, on the Invent Like An Owner Podcast, Dave speaks with Blake Scholl. They discuss Blake's time working on the Amazon Personalization team, and how he went on to build the team that built Amazon's Automated Advertising engine, that dynamically placed ads on Google Ads (before Google even had an API). Amazon's Automated Advertising engine started slow, but went on to drive billions in profitable sales for the company. It was fun to hear not only about the successes, but also about the …