Fetch my hat I'm off to the Amazon! (amazon.co.uk)

Member Name: Vialdana

Product:	amazon.co.uk
Date:	28/06/09 (31 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Wide choice of products, competitive prices, holding account for vouchers

Disadvantages: Search facility that needs an overhaul

Amazon is one of my favourite shopping websites - E-bay is number one, but Amazon probably falls a close second. One of the main reasons it's become such a favourite with me is that a lot of money making sites (like this one!) offer Amazon vouchers as a form of payout, and with Amazon it's easy to put your nicely earned gift vouchers into your account on the site and save them up for when you want them. I do this quite a lot and then have little spending spree's - often when we're low on cash proper and can't afford a treat that costs real money, we'll have a little shop on Amazon and spend a few £'s worth of hard earned vouchers instead.

Amazon began as a site that sold music and films, then it sort of just kept growing and these days you can buy everything from kitchen scales to push bikes and computers there. To be honest for the most part I do still use it for buying films - in DVD format these days (when I first began using the site we were still on videos which may show just how long I've been shopping here!). I have however bought a fairly eclectic range of products including quite recently a bright pink oven glove which I just had to have when I saw it as the colour perfectly matches my kitchen.

The other big change in recent years is that Amazon isn't just a shop anymore, it's also a portal for other sellers both private selling second hand goods and companies selling new wares. One rather nice thing with this is that you can still use your Amazon vouchers to buy items from these sellers as long as you're buying through the Amazon website. Unfortunately, although products bought directly from Amazon don't have high postage costs (free delivery if you spend £5 or more), the same thing doesn't apply to products bought from other people through the Amazon site, so it can get a bit expensive if you're not careful.

The search facility on the site is a pretty good if you just want to search the whole site for a particular item, but it can get a bit less helpful if you just want to search Amazon itself. In theory this is possible, but in practice it doesn't seem to work terribly well and I've often found it showing me items that are from private sellers or from other companies as well as their own stock. Another feature which I really wish they'd get sorted out is the ability to search from low to high or high to low in price - it just doesn't work and it's SO frustrating, you have to trawl though things with prices bouncing up and down when they should be steadily climbing or falling. To be honest these problems with the search facility are the worst thing about the site for me and do drive me to distraction on occasion. I think possibly it's only the saving grace of having vouchers for the place that has saved it on a few occasions.

Amazon products - I mean the ones bought direct from them - come it seems mostly from two different locations. One is right by me in Milton Keynes, and these seem to be fairly well packed and often if I've ordered several things they'll be packaged together which is great. The other location they seem to come from regularly - specially for DVD's - is Jersey. Now Jersey items are well packed, don't get me wrong. It's just that if I've got three DVD's that they're sending out at the same time from the same place, to the same address, surely it would be possible for them to put them in the same box! I'd have thought so, but on more than one occasion, I've had multiple packages turn up ON THE SAME DAY!!! Each one containing a single DVD along with the junk mail that they seem to think it's compulsory to include. So I get my three DVD's, along with three notes telling me what I've been sent, three leaflets about joining some club or other, and 3 leaflets telling me about more products I could buy from Amazon. It does frustrate me, I mean how wasteful, and how unnecessary!

On a more positive note, Amazon does have a good feature or two that it can smile about. The main one for me being that they have customer reviews of products and customer ratings. I often browse the site looking for something without really knowing more than I fancy a new book, or a new film to watch, so being able to see what other customers have thought of a product is quite good. For larger or more expensive items I'll often look on a dedicated review site like this one, but for things like DVD's it's nice to have it there on the shopping site when I'm browsing.

Overall, I do really like Amazon, it's a site with a lot of variety and generally speaking very good competetive prices (though other places do still beat them occasionally), I do think it would be nice though if they rewarded customers who keep coming back, - maybe that's the next big step for them, a reward scheme for loyal customers, so we could build our points up and get the odd free DVD or something!

Summary: Site is easy to use, has a lot of variety of products, and is worth checking out.