Today, in the Invent Like An Owner Podcast, Dave speaks with Josh Petersen and Matt Round. The conversation takes us back to Amazon’s early years, when the Personalization team was put together and built on features such as Similarities, Instant Recommendations, Cart Recommendations and more. The team strove to iteratively improve key features; over time, the Personalization and Automation worked toward Jeff Bezos’ vision of “a store for every customer”. They also talk about the effectiveness of …
Learn and Be Curious
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 Built its Associates Affiliate Marketing and Got Big Fast | Shawn Haynes
Today, in the Invent Like An Owner Podcast, Dave speaks with Shawn Haynes. They discuss how the Amazon Associates team built and grew the affiliate marketing program. Shawn grew the team from several hundred initial affiliate marketing websites to more than 500,000 by the time he moved on. He shares how the learnings from early Associates economics, such as focusing on cost per new customer rather than margin on individual sales, helped inform the Premium Associates and Megadeals that Amazon …