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Suggestive sells are one of the hallmarks of any online or offline retailer. Selling something to a customer based on "impulse positioning" is said to account for 10% to 30% of an online retailer's total sales. While that number fluctuates in brick-n-mortar stores, I'm quite sure Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (NYSE: WMT) monitors sales of checkout-line impulse items and optimizes that product mix form time to time. Enter Amazon.com, LLC (NASDAQ: AMZN), a pioneer in the field of "customer recommendations" placed next to millions of its products that goad customers into buying something they did not know they needed. But, times change, and the competition is fighting back at Amazon.com's success by offering online "upsell" systems to e-tailers everywhere.

What is Amazon.com to do? It seems that the grandaddy of online commerce needs to pull an innovative trick out of its hat and delve even deeper into grabbing even more sales from "customer recommendations." Although Amazon.com lists "like products" and "like accessories" next to that digital camera or even organic foods ("like complementary preparation items"), it may need more. Simply listing like products and giving some enticing language may not become enough in the near future, so it needs to create an even deeper understanding of consumer psychology to close more sales.

Newer competitors to Amazon.com feature products that track every detail of a consumer's visit to a web site and attempt to determine what the consumer is researching and browsing before it puts that first item into the virtual shopping cart. This information can make it easier to serve up the most efficient "like products" that increase the probability of an additional sale. There's no problem with this approach, but since Amazon.com has a built-in shopping audience that no other e-tailer can match, it should not only have that "tracking" trick in its bag, but use newer, enhanced measures that really personalize suggestive sells beyond the "other customers also bought this" mentality that seems a bit dated in 2007. If Amazon.com can weave more magic behind its screen and make each suggestive sell more personal (not impersonal), it can one-up the competition easily.

Can Amazon.com (AMZN) outdo new competitors on upsells? originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Fri, 24 Aug 2007 12:55:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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