I’ve given up, sold my soul and registered with Amazon. Using the site now is scary. I’m amazed at how many rough edges remain, I would have thought they’d have gotten rid of them all.
For instance, I had three items in my shopping basket, none of which related to Oracle, but because I’d browsed Oracle books, it tried to tell me that “Customers who bought the items in your shopping basket also bought:” Oracle books. It’s not so bad that it used the last books I’d browsed to recommend more (as much as I hate upselling), but you’d think they’d be careful to get the source (recent item views, not basket contents) right.
It also said “Hello Mia, we have recommendations for you”, but when I clicked on the link I got a page that said, “We’re sorry. We were unable to find any titles to recommend after looking at your purchase history.”. That would be because I’m a new user, dufus. You’d think the programmer would a) trap for users with no possible recommendations and not write out the link and b) ask for a sensible selection of beginner or best seller books to recommend. To make it worse, the ‘we have recommendations for you’ link is also present on the page where they say they don’t have recommendations for me. It’s not rocket science, kids.
And the font they use for ‘Your Site’ is incredibly crappy. It doesn’t match the weight, height, or aliasing of the original.