Andis Weblog

...there must have been a point in time (I didn't notice it), when Amazon started to expand their eBusiness range on several kinds of drinking and food, as you can see on their english homepage, choosing the category Gourmet Food.

Wanna buy some milk, for instance?
Bananas, apples or peaches?
Iceberg lettuce, tomatoes or onions?

Have a look on the sections Customers who bought this item also bought as well as Product Features on each product page... a little curious to see marketing concepts working for books and other anorganic stuff applied on food.
I would really like to know, if somebody ordered some food via Amazon already, and how it looked like, especially the fresh goods. Five minutes ago, I tried to order two pounds of cheese. But, as I presumed, I couldn't get one. The site tells me:

A nice example how not to design user interfaces is OPAC, an online search engine used by university libraries. Lots of students and post-graduates are dissatisfied because of getting results matching to their request in a syntactical manner, but not being able to get the books and publications having the content they really need. What would have happened, if Amazon came along with such an interface?
David Walker, web development librarian at the Cal State San Marcos , implemented a look-alike frontend using Web-Service technology to get the book metadata from Amazon. Enjoy.

[via Annette and netbib]