Recently in amazon Category

Since I live in Ireland I'm used to waiting several days (or longer) for my Amazon orders.

It's not an issue.

Yesterday morning I ordered a few DVDs, but since some of them weren't due out for another week or so I wasn't expecting to receive anything immediately.

So I nearly fell of my chair when I took delivery of a DVD boxset this morning. They'd managed to get it to me in approximately 24 hours! And no, I hadn't opted for express delivery or anything like that - I'd chosen the normal options with a total postage cost of £2.99.

Here's the part of the email:

Delivery estimate: 29 Aug 2008 - 4 Sep 2008
Dispatch estimate for these items: 26 Aug 2008

Wow!

I am truly impressed!

It looks like Amazon is jumping on the Green bandwagon as well...

I don't blame them. If I could push the "green" aspects of our new hosting solution more and it led to sales I would without hesitation.

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Since my blu ray player is a US import I have to be very very careful about which discs I buy.

I either choose US region or multi-region discs, since there is no easy way to make a blu ray player recognise all discs (yet!)

Unfortunately Amazon haven't updated their website to take into account the Blu Ray regions.

Any film released on blu ray will end up with a DVD region listed beside it, which is, of course, incorrect. The silly thing is that Amazon's site has all the information on regions for blu rays - it's just the item display that is showing the wrong data.

It's a shame, but at least Amazon actually show the disc region, whereas a lot of the other sites don't even do that much!

Amazon.com had issues last week, but today it's Amazon UK's turn.

How long it was down for is unclear, but several people, including myself, got an unhelpful "service unavailable" message when trying to access the site earlier this evening.

It just goes to show - 100% uptime is a myth :)

Amazon's main site, Amazon.com, has been down for the last hour or more. Currently some sections of the website are available sporadically.

The really scary thing is that based on their reported revenues every minute of downtime equates to about $31000 of lost revenue!

Now that is really mission critical!

In the meantime you might amuse yourself looking at some of the craziness in the current whois output:

Either there's an upsurge in Amazon phishing emails or the phishers only got my email address recently.

I've had about half a dozen phishing emails today purporting to be from Amazon regarding my "seller" account.

To start with I don't have a seller account.

The other giveaway sign is that although the links are similar to Amazon domains, they aren't Amazon domains.

They all seem to be subdomains of by.ru, which appears to be some sort of free hosting solution based in Russia (I don't speak Russian, so I'm only making an educated guess)

Unfortunately, while Amazon do have a facility for reporting phishing emails it is clearly not aimed at the "casual" end user or anyone who is short of time. It consists of a rather convoluted series of web forms instead of a simple email address.

While the likes of Paypal, Ebay and most of the major financial institutions make it relatively easy for even a novice to report phishing emails Amazon dare to be different.

While they may be getting the reports in from honeypots etc., surely it would make more sense to facilitate end user reports?
Am I missing something?

UPDATE: Over 24 hours later I got a reply from Amazon with the email address to use for reporting phishing emails.
In case anyone else needs it the email address is: stop-spoofing@amazon.com
If you forward phishing emails to that address as an attachment they get sent to their security team.

One of the nice features on Amazon's US site is finally coming to the UK store - pre-order price guarantee.

Basically if you pre-order an item the "guarantee" means that you are rewarded with the lowest price possible, so if an item is listed at one price when you order and it drops before the release date you'll actually get a refund.

Pretty cool!

For the geekier of you who maybe using Amazon's web services the news that Amazon is now peering with several Irish providers at INEX may come as good news!

You can check the peering matrix here

As I'm running several sites that pull quite a bit of data in from Amazon's backend this is good news !

EDIT: I meant to link to Paul's blog post