Sunday, August 02, 2009

Amazon has a Garage  

So I was going through my junk in my car today and found some old light bulbs in my auto emergency kit. I wanted to find out whether a 921LL bulb would fit my Nissan Pathfinder or whether it was a leftover from my Isuzu Rodeo kit.

A few quick searches on Google seemed to indicate the answer was yes, but I didn't get a definitive answer until I got to Amazon and searched for the part number.

Amazon, surprisingly enough, had a form where you could indicate the year, make and model of your vehicle, against which it would check the part in question. But then it said something more: it said, "sign in to check this part against vehicles in your garage."

HFS.

I signed in, and frankly it was a bit of a bear to navigate to a point where I found "my garage". Essentially, I had to start looking for parts again, enter a vehicle, and then I found it automatically saved that information to "my garage".

This is definitely a "hidden feature": Amazon could make that more discoverable, and I haven't yet found any information on this feature online or on their site or on its help features. This may be an oversight, or the feature could be in development.

Once a vehicle was entered, though, it was relatively easy to add more information about the trim and features of my car, and Amazon then gave me a complete list of the parts they sold for my car - all 2,156 of them, at last count.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I'm glad I own Amazon stock. I bought it *after* the Internet crash convinced that ten years from now they'd still be going places, and they haven't proved me wrong yet.

Keep up the good work, Jeff.
-the Centaur

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