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Amazon calls it an important innovation, but the company's new auction function has already run into trouble.
When it launched a new auction service last week, Amazon, the pioneering online book and CD retailer, began cross-promoting the service by linking related auction items with the book pages of its highly trafficked Web site.
When someone on Amazon browses a page for a book on the movie Casablanca, a list appears promoting Casablanca-related auction items, such as a chair from the set of Rick's Cafe Americain.
At least that's how it's supposed to work.
But when Amazon.com shopper Wendy Cassity looked up the listing for a women's book on dressing for success Sunday, she found some odd related items pitched her way.
"I was looking for a book I'd seen at a store on women's wardrobe. I typed it in [at Amazon.com] and looked it up ... and found Dressing Right for Business. Skimming [the related auction items for sale] I found all these Playboy magazines."
Alongside of the back issues of Hugh Hefner's magazine was listed a 1979 copy of the raunchier Gent, which touts itself as "Home of the D-Cups."
She wrote Amazon and told them about what she thought was a creepy result that got in the way of book shopping.
"Some of the other brought up strange items of clothing like a T-shirt with a picture of a Tonka truck on it."
Amazon.com opened its auction store on 30 March, hosting items from third parties on the retail site. Among the tens of thousands of items for sale are toy trains, a red-vinyl pressing of the Beatles' White Album, and a book of poetry by Jim Morrison. These items are tied to the bookstore by means of proprietary "cross-merchandising" software developed by Amazon.com.
Other book listings return similarly odd results. Fashion-conscious men are led to make bids on back issues of Playboy, too. The listing for Maximum Style: Look Sharp and Feel Confident in Every Situation produced back copies dating from a current collection to April 1969.
Paisley Goes with Nothing: A Man's Guide to Looking Better, Feeling Better, and For Once Behaving as If Your Head Wasn't Sewn on Backwards turned up a used title on the expansion of the universe, and The Allure of Discus, apparently a coffee-table reader.
New Women's Dress for Success produced auctioned counterparts Anglo-Saxon Military Institutions on the Eve of The Norman Conquest, and Rudeness & Civility: 19th Century Manners & Etiquette.
Other related items seem more on target. Dress Casually for Success ... For Men produced among its auction items a "brand new, mint-condition, forest-green Disney Tigger baseball hat," khaki shorts, and an extra, extra large "pug dog design" shirt.
Amazon spokesperson Paul Capelli said the company hopes to engineer changes soon to make the auction items more relevant to the book listings they appear with.
"We're hoping that as we continue on here, the items will become more and more related as we progress.... There are some suggestions that appear that are not as directly related as we would like."
He said within the next 48 hours, software changes should produce more appropriate results. "In the meantime, what it is doing is showing the array, the selection -- sort of a spectrum of items that are there," he said.
Amazon told Cassity in an email that the company was making every effort to make the listings more "appropriate." The email said, "As you would imagine, we want to help you discover things you want that we offer."
Cassity, a 24-year-old law student at Columbia University, says she has used Amazon for over a year. "[My husband and I] probably use it once a week for our jobs -- business books."
But she wants to see the company remove the new feature because it only gets in the way of her book shopping.
"It takes up about 25 percent of the page. The auction section takes up as much of the page as the book, author, et cetera. I think it's ridiculous."
Amazon's Capelli said the site was redesigned as of Monday morning so that auction items appear off to the left of the page, less prominently than before.
