Reviews, Lists, & Cool Features
Chapter 12: Putting Your Two Cents In: Reviews, Lists, & Cool Features
5. Click the Submit button
After you’ve found the ASIN or ISBN for your recommendation, you’re ready to give some customer advice. Here’s how you do it:
1. Go to the item’s detail page where you want your recommendation to
You find your Friends & Favorites area in Your Store. To get there, click the Friends & Favorites link — it’s the last item on the subnav. When you first start out at Amazon, your Friends & Favorites looks a little bare. But as you shop and participate in the community, your Friends & Favorites fattens up (so to speak) to offer a bounty of fun extras.
But before you create your Friends & Favorites, you should know the differ- ence between a “friend” and a “favorite.”
Amazon Friend. At Amazon.com, an Amazon Friend is someone who has access to the private view of your About You area. You have to create your About You area, and it may contain personal information such as your e-mail address. You determine who your Amazon Friends are, so you don’t have to worry about suddenly having “friends” you don’t want (spammers, troglodytes, your 6th grade boyfriend) know too much.
Favorite People.Favorite People at Amazon are also people you select, but they don’t have access to your private About You area. Typically, they’re people whose opinions you trust; when you pick them, Amazon uses any reviews they’ve written to populate your Friends & Favorites page.
In short, Friends have access to your About You Area; Favorites don’t.
Friends & Favorites highlights
Friends & Favorites is the roosting place for lots of the personalization fea- tures offered at Amazon.com. For the record, most of those features also have other homes on the site, but Friends & Favorites is an easy way to revel in their glory because they’re all in one place.
In the beginning, before you add to it, your Friends & Favorites area will look something like Figure 12-7. In it, you find all kinds of goodies:
An invitation to get started. In the center of the page you find three blocks of text. The first invites you to create your About You area, the second invites you to create a Wish List, and the third invites you to find and add people to your Favorites list (this third is actually a repeat of the search box that only shows up on this Starter page — see the next bullet).
A special Search box.It’s true that there’s a Search box at the top left of every page, but the one in your Friends & Favorites area lets you search for people. By this I mean that you can search for other Amazon cus- tomers who may have public profiles, wish lists, registries, and so on.
You can search by name, nickname, or e-mail address.
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Chapter 12: Putting Your Two Cents In: Reviews, Lists, & Cool Features
The master list of cool personalization features.You find these on the left side of the page in the Explore box. This really is the most convenient catalog of all that’s cool and free and personal on Amazon.com.
Friends & Favorites management tools. Below the fold is a very important box. It’s the Manage Your Friends & Favorites box — the easiest (but of course not the only) access you have to these management/editing links.
After you’ve spent some time with your Friends & Favorites, it’ll look more like mine (as in Figure 12-8) and some new things will appear on the page:
Content based on stuff you picked. In the center of the page you find an assortment of content based on the information you’ve entered in your Friends & Favorites area. In Figure 12-8, you notice that I have a review from one of my Favorite People and some Purchase Circle content based on where I live. (I talk more about Purchase Circles later in the chapter.) Your Favorite People list.This you have to create, but after you do, it’s
conveniently located on the left side of the page below the Explore box.
A list of the things you’re participating in at Amazon. This is also known as the Your Participation box; you’ll find it on the right side of the page just below the nav. If you’ve set up a registry, written a review, cre- ated a list, done anything Amazon-ey, it shows up in this box and you can access it by clicking the link.
Figure 12-7:
Friends &
Favorites houses all the links to the fun personal- ization features at Amazon.
com.
Tell me about yourself: Creating and building your About You area
Your About You area is your own little Amazon club house — your own space on the site that could include a profile, a wish list, a photo, and so on. Before you can beef up your About You area, you have to create it. Here’s how:
1. Go to your Friends & Favorites area by clicking the link in the subnav