Has Amazon.com flipped?

If you’ve visited Amazon recently, you may have had your first  experience with Amazon’s new “Flip to back” feature.

Their “Look inside” feature has always been a hit, so this addition may not be that impressive to you, but I think its subtlety is precisely why it is noteworthy. The “Look Inside” feature lets you virtually “open” the book to a certain page, do a few keyword searches, and even read significant amounts of passages from the book without purchasing it. Just like when you shop for a book in a traditional, brick-and-mortar bookstore.

What was missing before is one other thing you probably do when you browse at a traditional bookstore. You first look at the cover, then flip it over to read whatever is on the back cover. Amazon somehow realized this, and has now found a way to let you virtually flip the book over and read the back cover on many of its titles.

A simple, subtle update, perhaps, but noteworthy because that’s EXACTLY how you successfully build any customer experience. You find out what they want, find a profitable way to give it to them, then you ask them how they liked it and what they’d like to see next time, and you find a profitable way to improve it so they’ll come back and tell others about the experience. And if they’re that happy, they make your competition irrelevant because if you’re giving them what they want, they have no reason to go to your competition.

Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream.” – Malcolm Mudderidge