'Whatever happened to your cardigan, Arnold?'

I met a friend who loves reading and we exchanged notes.  ‘I buy all my books from Amazon these days.  I flick through them all and if there are any I don’t like I just return them and get my card refunded. Easy peasy’. ‘Don’t you ever think about using libraries?’ I replied.  ‘God no, they’re just full of wheezing old men in dufflecoats and the great unwashed checking their emails’ I felt it was a pretty unfair description and shared my enthusiasm for borrowing books rather than always having to buy them. He stared at me vacantly as if  I’d just declared my support for Belisha Beacons, Trilby Hats and Listen with Mother. And then it dawned on me.  He wasn’t just using Amazon as an on-line shop, he was using it as a library.

I think libraries are great, but they must crank up their on-line appeal if they are going to attract the internet generation.  My own portal into their parallel universe of  literature and knowledge is through Libraries West.  It is not, it has to be said, the most attractive website. It seriously undersells its benefits and doesn’t highlight the fact that you can, for the paltry sum of 65p, borrow any book in the country via their Inter Library loan service.   You have free access to the on-line version of Encyclopaedia Britannia too and they will text you when your book is ready to collect.   I wanted to read ‘Walks and Talks of an American farmer in England’ published in 1852.  They tracked down a single copy from the Town Planning library at Sheffield University and it was mine to read for three glorious weeks. And all for the princely sum of 65p!

On the subject of good writing, here is the winning tweet from the Hay Festival as selected by Stephen Fry: “I believe we can build a better world! Of course, it’ll take a whole lot of rock, water & dirt. Also, not sure where to put it.” Brilliant.

Engraved on the doors of the Amazon warehouse entrance is Jeff Bezos’s motivational phrase to all his employees ‘Work hard, have fun, make history‘.  Just below this notice (and written in invisible ink), is the following addendum  ‘and thanks for making me a multi-billionaire in the process‘. The growth of Amazon has been truly phenomenal.  From a two-bedroom house in Seattle in 1994, with extension leads running into the garage to power the servers, to a global business now serving 45 million customers.

When I’ve run e-commerce seminars, one of the questions I regularly ask delegates is ‘What do you think is the secret of Amazon’s success?’  Almost everyone says – ‘ the low prices’ or ‘the range of stock they carry’.  I then bring up the quote from Jeff Bezos himself, which underpins the Amazon philosophy – ‘Amazon.com is obsessively focussed on great customer service‘. It is a sentence that should be enshrined in the heart of every e-commerce entrepreneur.

It is hard to believe that when Amazon started receiving its first online orders, the programmers coded a small electronic beep to sound in the office every time an order arrived.  Every beep was greeted with a loud cheer in the Amazon office. It wasn’t long before they had to switch it off. Permanently.

Female Blackbird singing

If you are running an ecommerce store, then Sitemaker’s twitter stream offer some excellent daily tweets with their ‘e-commerce thought for the day’. Here is an example: When using technology on the website, don’t forget the commercial reality, basically it’s still just people shopping. How easy it is to forget that very simple truth! One of the most successful footwear e-commerce stores Zappos looks a bit clunky on the screen, but that is because it is totally customer focussed. Customer feedback, You Tube videos, Twitter stream, Live customer support – it has the lot.  But they haven’t done too badly – they have just been brought by Amazon for $928 million