Amazon, intentionally or not, have done a great job with their special offer feature that suggests a second book to you and offers you both at the same time for a discount.
One could argue that it’s not in their interests to offer you a second book that you would buy later anyway at its normal price. (Yes, you can argue that it’s implicitly in their interest because it creates goodwill.)
At least in this customer’s experience, they do a great job of offering me things that I might want but never offering me anything I already know that I want. You might think that that’s because I always immediately buy everything I want, but that’s not true.
Today they slipped up and offered me something I knew in advance that I also wanted. I went to look at Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages, and after I clicked to see the book, I wondered if they might just maybe offer me Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. And… they did.
That’s a first for me. I buy lots of books on Amazon, and I’ve never been offered something I knew I wanted.
Of course it’s also in their interests to occasionally slip up like this. Then people write blog posts praising them and saying how good their algorithms are.
At least for me, Amazon’s “better together” is almost pitch perfect. They consistently land tempting titles just outside the small ring of books I’ve already decided I’m going to buy at some later point. (Note that making special offers like this is very different from the far simpler “customers who bought X also bought Y” – which is just a lookup.) It’s easy to imagine Amazon’s algorithms trying to figure out what I’m almost certainly going to buy anyway, and what I might well buy but probably wont, and picking something tantalizing and just over the edge, just out of reach. What a great way to push readers’ boundaries while making more sales and not leaving money on the table.
Whatever’s going on, and whatever you think might be going on, it’s clearly not simple to keep customers happy and enthusiastic via special offers that do not sacrifice money the customer would in fact spend anyway.