NEW YORK (AP) -- Amazon.com's shoppers now have a way to find the Internet retailer's most popular books, videos and music in 3,000 different cities, universities and workplaces.
A new service, called Purchase Circles, can help shoppers track everything from the most popular CDs in Miami to best-selling books at Harvard University. The Purchase Circle service will appear on Amazon.com's Web site starting today.It is an example of the company's use of technology to collect consumer data, and then use the information to make online shopping easier.
For instance, Amazon.com has already found great success with a service that suggests merchandise to suit shoppers' own interests. A customer selecting a CD of a trumpet concerto by Haydn now sees a list of CDs that others who have bought the same recording have also ordered from Amazon.com.
"Amazon has really been one of the pioneers in using data about a particular person to better their business," said Ken Cassar, an analyst at the Internet research firm Jupiter Communications. "This is just another effort by Amazon to make their site more than just a place to go to buy. They are giving customers lots of information at their fingertips."
To find the right Purchase Circle, Amazon.com customers will browse through lists of places, companies, schools, organizations or government agencies. Once the right circle is found, the customer chooses whether to search for a book, video or music. Then a list of the 10 most popular items bought by Amazon.com customers in that Purchase Circle appears.
For instance in Los Angeles right now, Amazon.com's No. 1 video is "The Stanley Kubrick Collection."
Shoppers in Anchorage, Alaska, like the book "Hide Your Assets and Disappear: A Step-by-Step Guide to Vanishing Without A Trace" by Edmund J. Pankau.
Within the U.S. Army, the most popular book is "The Patterns of War Since the Eighteenth Century" by Larry H. Addington.
To create a Purchase Circle, Amazon.com collects buying information based on what products it ships to a particular Zip code. It also tracks goods bought by people with the same e-mail address, such as allstate.com or army.mil.
In developing each top-selling list, the company also factors in what is unique about the products being bought in each particular area. For instance, books on the LDS Church will likely be included in a Purchase Circle for Salt Lake City if a comparatively large number of such books sell in that city versus other areas around the country.
Analysts say there are no privacy concerns with the new Purchase Circle service since the company does not release the preferences of any individuals and only creates a Purchase Circle after hundreds of items are bought in a particular area.
Amazon.com's new service exemplifies how it is integrating the Internet company PlanetAll into its business.
PlanetAll, which Amazon.com bought for $90 million a year ago, enables users to create an Internet address book and calendar that can be shared with others. That same "community" concept can be seen in the Purchase Circles.