Amazon Archive

Next Tuesday is the annual holiday known as Valentine’s Day. The day is named after St. Valentine and over 150 million cards are exchanged – here’s the full history of this very special day. This year the new deal sites are holding a cage match with each site offering a deal with a national floral delivery service. Most of these deals expire asap so you should be quick if you want to grab some flowers for your sweetie. Also note that the delivery fees are higher for a delivery on Valentine’s day. Lastly, I see some of the local cities within the deal sites are also offering flower deals so make sure to check your local city before purchasing a national deal.

If you want to pick up flowers yourself, I am hearing the best deal for super fresh roses is Whole Foods with 2 dozen for $19.99. Make sure to call your local store to get current pricing. If you don’t have a Whole Foods in your area, Walmart is offering 1 dozen roses for $15 beginning today.

LivingSocial – offers $25 for $50 credit at Teleflora. I used this deal yesterday for some flowers for my mom who is recovering after some surgery – note, there is a $15 or more service fee and Teleflora added me to their email marketing list even though I specifically unchecked the boxes to be added to their lists. Voucher may be applied towards service costs.

Groupon – offers $20 for $40 credit at FTD.com. Voucher may be applied towards service costs.

Google Offers – from what I can tell, this deal has now expired but they were offering 2 dozen roses, vase and shipping for $45.

Amazon Local – offers $15 for $30 credit at ProFlowers. Voucher may be applied towards service costs.

Eversave – offers $25 for 2 movie tickets and a $10 gift card good at 1-800-flowers.com.

It’s important to note that there are tons of discount codes available for most of the online florists so make sure to spend a few minutes to find the best deal for the floral arrangement you are interested in.

Continue reading “Deal Site Smackdown: The Valentine’s Day Edition” »

Last week I was shopping at Staples and I played with the Amazon Kindle Fire. It really is a nice looking device, it’s thin and the 7″ size seems like a good portable tablet compared to the Galaxy Tab 10.1″ which I use nearly exclusively at home. Eventually I think I will get a 7″ tablet so that I can keep it in my car’s glove box for on-demand meetings and on-the-go connectivity (unless I finally upgrade my Windows Mobile 6 smartphone). There have been some posts about security issues and other flaws with the Kindle Fire but Amazon appears to be working on fixes. Marco Arment has a thorough and very critical review of the device.

If you want to get the Kindle Fire, I think today is your best chance to get a good deal. It’s been nearly impossible to find a good deal on the Kindle Fire since retailers other than Amazon (e.g. Staples, Office Max, etc.) don’t allow coupons to be used on Kindle products.

The deal is available today only and you need to have a Mastercard. Amazon and Mastercard are running a deal, for today only, that offers $10 off a $100 purchase and then an additional $10 certificate will be sent to you to use in the future on a $50 purchase. Make sure to read the terms and conditions of the offer.

So you can pick up the Kindle Fire for a net of $179 with free shipping and no tax for most.  The coupon can also be used on the Kindle Touch 3G and Kindle Keyboard 3G since they are over $100. If you want the Kindle Touch or basic Kindle, you will need a filler item to get over the $100 mark.

The most popular deal request I am asked for help with continues to be the Apple iPod Touch. Even with this year clearly being the year of the tablet, it seems like everyone still wants to get an iPod Touch as a gift for a friend, colleague or family member. Last week I learned that HTC offers a similar device called the “Flyer” which is like an iPod Touch except that it is based on Android instead of iOS – I wonder why this hasn’t seemed to catch on as of yet (at least it’s not a popular item on the deal boards.

Here are this week’s top deals for the iPod Touch – frankly the Amazon deal is the best one because, for most, there is no sales tax. The key is that you should absolutely not purchase the iPod Touch at the Apple Store – save the cash and use it for apps or music!

Best Buy – Here the deal is on the 8GB model – for $189 plus a free $30 Best Buy gift card. (deal details)

Amazon – It seems Amazon has matched the deal from Best Buy (they seem to be matching a lot of electronics prices as of late) – purchase the 8GB model at Amazon for $189 and get $30 to use towards MP3 songs from the Amazon Music Store. Smart move here by Amazon because it gets you to buy songs from Amazon versus from iTunes. (deal details)

Target – If you want a larger iPod Touch, Target will be your best option. Purchase the 32GB iPod Touch for $295 and get a $40 Target gift card. (this is an in-store deal)

I have a 8GB iPod Touch and I really like it for walking – the Galaxy Tab has replaced most of my at-home general game playing.

Continue reading “The Latest iPod Touch Holiday Deals” »

This might be the biggest deal of all of the Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend. Amazon, the company known most recently for the launch of a brand new tablet called the Kindle Fire, is running a lightning deal for VHS tapes. Amazon, the company that powers the web infrastructure for thousands of major Internet companies through Amazon Web Services, is running a lightning deal for VHS tapes. Amazon, the company that allows you to watch television shows and movies instantly, is running a lightning deal for VHS tapes.

Specifically, the lightning deal is for, “Maxell T120GX/8PK VHS Cassette Standard Grade T-120, 6 Hour, 8 Pack”. I would be all over this but the tapes are only standard grade. I always look for premium grade in my VHS tapes.

I don’t know about you but when I think VHS tapes the first thing that comes to my mind is recording Kelly Kapowski on Saturday mornings back in the late 80′s.

You might be wondering why anyone would want to buy this 8-pack of VHS tapes. Well, first, they make great stocking stuffers. Second, they are great to teach your children about what life was like pre-Netflix. Thinking creatively, you could use the film as party poppers by offering a tape to each of your New Year’s Eve guests!

If you want in, you better hurry – the lightning deal ends in just about one hour! And in a shocker, over 15% of the quantity is already gone!

Continue reading “Amazon Runs HUGE Lightning Deal for Maxell VHS Tapes” »

Here’s an interesting offer that Amazon is making on some products for Amazon Prime members. If you aren’t in a rush to get your product, Amazon will give you a $1 coupon to use in their MP3 store instead of the free two-day shipping that comes with an Amazon Prime membership. The items will be delivered in 5-7 days which is the standard shipping option generally offered on an Amazon product.

It looks like this trade offer is only available in the U.S. and the coupons for the MP3 songs must be used by the end of January so I assume this offer will be available until the end of the year. You can read the full terms here.

My guess is that the products that will offer this shipping-for-mp3 trade will be those where Amazon has to use the real 2-day Fedex/UPS shipping rather than the ground shipping they use for a lot of their 2-day deliveries. For example, I ordered an ink cartridge for my Canon printer with 2-day shipping. The ink showed up in 2 days but was shipped from a very close location so Amazon was able to effectively ship it overnight to me (they shipped it after the first day) using the UPS Ground delivery method.

Someone on one of the deal boards said, “sell people Amazon Prime and then pay them not to use it.”

Amazon entered the daily deals space last month with their launch of AmazonLocal. The service launched on June 2 in Boise with deals sourced from LivingSocial (Amazon is an investor in LivingSocial). At the end of June, AmazonLocal added the following cities: Tacoma, Seattle and Bellevue in Washington State.

Today the AmazonLocal service has expanded into Southern California – the Los Angeles and Long Beach regions. The first deal in LA is for a canvas print (those sure seem popular on the daily deal sites!). Long Beach launches with the ever popular tanning session. So far 379 vouchers for the canvas prints have been purchased.

I like that AmazonLocal just provides the information about the deal and none of the “extra content” that Groupon does – content which I believe is a complete waste of money to build. People want the deals period.

You can use your Amazon account to check out and apparently the customer service is provided directly by Amazon — which is a good thing considering how super-responsive Amazon is when there is an issue.

On Tuesday morning, hosting service Media Temple was out of service while the company dealt with a DNS resolution issue. Media Temple staff provided an overview of what happened in the comments section of my post.

Now today Amazon Web Services is down — actually only parts of the Amazon Web Services cloud computing offering is down. I use their S3 storage service and that is up and running. As of 9:00AM Eastern, the following message provides the current status related to the downtime, “6:09 AM PDT EBS API errors and volume latencies in the affected availability zone remain. We are continuing to work towards resolution.”

It’s interesting to watch bloggers including Martin Bryant and Mike Butcher only point to the same set of sites (Quora, Foursquare, Reddit and Hootsuite) that use Amazon’s EC2 and are down. There are plenty of other sites that are down including Easybib, a site run by a close friend of mine that is the largest online bibliography site in the world. And Easybib is just one example of time-critical services that are affected. So while it’s easy for us to look at a few social media services that are affected, just think about all of the business, professional and utility services that are also currently down.

Update 10am Eastern – it looks like the problems are expanding – here’s the latest update:

6:59 AM PDT There has been a moderate increase in error rates for CreateVolume. This may impact the launch of new EBS-backed EC2 instances in multiple availability zones in the US-EAST-1 region. Launches of instance store AMIs are currently unaffected. We are continuing to work on resolving this issue.
7:40 AM PDT In addition to the EBS volume latencies, EBS-backed instances in the US-EAST-1 region are failing at a high rate. This is due to a high error rate for creating new volumes in this region.

You can follow the updates around the Amazon EC2 issues on the Amazon Health Dashboard. As with all downtime, please feel free to report in the comments if your site is down due to the Amazon issue.