Customer loyalty & buying books

We had some guys from the Boston Consulting Group a while back talking about various current trends and other things. They also touched on the trend of "trading up" as they called it. The idea is that more and more consumers start buying premium brand products in the segments that they value and then to finance these premium purchases, they offset the difference by buying cheap stuff in other segments. So for example, to finance my new Boss overcoat, I'm going to eat rice for the next month. So the natural evolution, then, is that the middle-class players who aren't quite competing with the premium brands but also aren't in the price game will just die a boring death.

In the past few years when I've been buying something, I've been preferring small, local companies. Even if they charge a bit more, but at least I get good service and that the money goes to financing Finnish entrepreneurship. For instance, I could purchase my contact lenses online through some company and save a bit, but instead I use the small, privately owned optometrist in Salo. The service is always nice and personal and they know my name. The same thing goes for clothing, fairly often. There's this nice place in Salo called Eino Heino, which has brilliant service and quite a decent inventory. And history.

So I tried to order some books from BookPlus last night. Nothing fancy, just some stuff from the list I keep on my homepage. I gather the books into the shopping cart, go to the check out and start filling out the forms, and... Database connection error! Brilliant. Oh well, they're still a decent company, so I restart the process, select the books, check out... Database connection error! And it happened a third time too. Long story short, ended up ordering the books I wanted (and then some) from Amazon.com. If the service becomes degrades or something in the process doesn't click, then that's it. I know what I want, I know what price I'm ready pay and if something doesn't just work, I'm not going to jump through hoops, especially if I'm the customer.

However, depending on how this Amazon.com venture (I've never bought anything from there before) goes, I may just move back to BookPlus. We'll see...