Editorial was handselling products with clever writing and intuitive decisions about what to promote. (“We ain’t lion: this adorable Goliath Backpack Pal is a grrreat way to scare away those first-day-of-school jitters,” read the home page in 1999, promoting a lion-shaped back-pack for kids.) Personalization was skipping the puns and building a store for every customer using cold, hard data to stock the shelves with the items that customers were statistically the most likely to buy. Bezos did not explicitly favor one group over the other, but he looked at the results of tests. Over time it
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