Standing in a Barnes & Noble, flipping through a book you are considering to purchase, you can now pull out your cell phone, write a txt a message to 262966 (Amazon on a phone pad) that contains the ISDN, UPC code, or name of the book and Amazon will reply back with the price of the book and an offer to buy it.    The book could now be 20-40% cheaper if you are willing to wait a couple days for shipping. 

The next versions are sure to include being able to take a picture of the UPC with your phone camera, send that up and receive your price and availability of the product. 

 This time next year, it will be interesting to know what percentage of retail store sales are pre-scanned at Amazon before purchase. 

 Also consider the possibilities of advertising.  While walking through the airport, an advertisement panel on the wall shows the latest Iacocca leadership book and at the bottom it gives you the Amazon SMS # and a short code for the product.  In two minutes you’ve purchased the book. 

About six months ago we designed a similar addon module for Blue Martini Commerce that would allow this type of sms commerce.  It fell in the priority list as being a little too far out there from a consumer adoption standpoint.  Looks like we will need to reconsider. 

Barnes & Noble refreshed their website recently and some of the additions are useful but overall falls short.    When you reach the refreshed site, a 1/3 of the page is dedicated to B&N picks presented in a scrolling flash window.  Unfortunately, you are only given a pause button instead of back/forward/skip a page controls.  This leads to problems when you are interested in an item and you don’t get your mouse up to it quick enough, it’s off the page and you have to wait for a full rotation to get back to it.   It’s also dissappointing that in 2007 the picks are selections chosen by BN without any regard to who I am. 

Another item of interest is the product cloud at the bottom showing the “Most Popular Search Terms”.   I don’t know how much others find this useful, but I’m really into tag clouds.  It’s useful to determine what’s hot in the space the cloud is segregated to. 

The problem with the implementation is that it’s only on the main page and it had search terms from the whole site.    I find it odd to see Halo, Harry Potter, Pulp Fiction and The Wisdom of Menopause all of the same popularity/importance presented to me.   On the main page, this is fine although not very useful.  But when I go to the landing page for the Computing & Internet category (or any other), there’s no product cloud.   This is where I think it has the most power.  First let me the consumer tell you a little bit about what I’m interested in.   Then present the hot areas that other people have been looking for confined to my area of interest.  In that context, it becomes an invitation for me to explore further that I probably didn’t intend to explore before. 

Customer reviews are still no where to be found.  I don’t get it.

I don’t know if they always had this, but I noticed that they have an option to purchase the books used from other resellers.   I’ve never found this feature to be that great on Amazon as I normally buy 5-10 books at a time online and I don’t want them coming from 3-7 places.   I would have much preferred to see customer reviews than this feature.

Lastly, I don’t know that it has any relation to this refresh, but BN teamed up with Digby to offer their books via mobile ecommerce on Blackberry’s.   A special Blackberry applet needs to be downloaded to puruse the catalog and purchase.  I’m going to download the app in a few days as it seems that the digby site is being slammed with traffic at the moment.