Open Letter to Jeff Bezos: Please Create an Amazon.com Tip Jar

6 October 2009 | Community, Culture, Internet, Marketing, Media, Social Media | Comments

[Cross-posted with the iMedia Connection blogs.]

Dear Jeff,

I’m a fan, a BIG fan, both of you and of Amazon.com. Want specifics? I got the very first Kindle and later the Kindle Dx. Love ‘em, and sometimes buy the same book in digital AND hardcover formats… both from Amazon. I’m a Prime member and think it’s the best $79.00 I spend each year. I prefer to buy mp3s via Amazon over iTunes, bought-and-downloaded the entire second season of Mad Men through your Unbox interface to watch on plane rides. I could go on, but I won’t, because I want to get to the point of this letter quickly.

Jeff, I’m begging you to create an Amazon Tip Jar that happy Amazon customers like me can use to reward the independent bookstores that Amazon is, quite simply and inarguably, killing dead dead dead. “Tip,” here means both the “ooooh, thanks for the recommendation” sort of tip and also the “here’s a few bucks for good service” tip. Your doing ths will be good for the Amazon brand, good for the world, the right thing to do, and technologically easy– combining your existing Associates program and Gift Card program.

Why should you do this? Here’s one story that, I hope, will make my point.

My guilty moment
About a year ago I was chatting with the proprietors at The Mystery Bookstore in Westwood, California (wonderful place: you ought to visit, here’s a map), where over the years I’ve happily spent a lot of money and, more importantly, received a ton of high-quality, personalized book recommendations that trump the “Frequently Bought Together” and “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” advice from your ecommerce algorithms.

On this fateful day, the nice lady at the register suggested Gregg Hurwitz’s terrific mystery “The Crime Writer” and made it sound fascinating (it is!).

I could have spend $14.00 plus tax right there in the store, but instead I covertly checked my Kindle, found it and later bought it on that platform for $9.99. Why? My Kindle was relatively new, and I wanted to see if I could fall into a mystery on that platform (yup, sure could).

But man, I felt guilty. Later, after I finished The Crime Writer, I wanted to give the folks at The Mystery Bookstore a reward, a bounty, if you will, for such a great recommendation. I wanted to hand them $5 — yes, the book is THAT good — but I didn’t, in part because I couldn’t face the perp walk of shame to the register to confess that I took their recommendation and bought it for the Kindle, and in part because I couldn’t imagine what they would DO with five bucks. There’s no “random money” entry in most cash registers, and many people would simply pocket the money rather than have to figure out what to do with it.

Jeff, help me assuage my guilt!
You can solve this problem: with an Amazon Tip Jar I could decide to reward The Mystery Bookstore later by sending them a thank you tip for the Hurwitz tip. All I’d need to do is click on the “Send a Tip!” link at Amazon.com, enter the email address or physical address of the tip-receiver, choose my dollar amount, and then go through the usual, expedient Amazon buying process.

This would be entirely voluntary for the customer — which means it might fail — but tipping at restaurants is voluntary and most of us do it.

If I browse a copy of Michael J. Mauboussin’s “Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition” (it’s on my Amazon wish list) at the local independent bookstore and later choose to save $10.18 by buying it through Amazon, I could send $1.99 — the cost of an episode of most TV shows at Amazon or iTunes — as a tip to the local shop… that means I still save $8.19, which is a lot.

Think of the positive brand exposure for Amazon! You could even make actual little glass jars that a store could have next to the register with signs that read, “Tip Jar: See something here that you’re gonna buy from Amazon? Tips appreciated!” and have the store’s email address on the jar. And it doesn’t need to be limited to bookstores (although that’s what started me down this chain of thought): if a blogger represents a book, I could say thank you. If a speaker at a conference mentions a book and I buy it, I could say thank you.

Nobody would respect a $1.99 gift certificate, but a tip? Who wouldn’t smile at that and think, “gosh, that’s nice… thanks!”

Amazon is the undisputed king of ecommerce, the cradle of the long tail, the enabler of authors to get their books in front of people in a hurry, but what Amazon doesn’t do well is have a real-time conversation… the one when how the customer’s eyes light up while she talks about one book sparks another title in the mind of the merchant. Independent bookstore owners do that very  well. You can help keep them around.

Please think about it.

Sincerely from a fan and loyal Amazon customer,

Brad Berens