Amazon geek?

I’m pretty much an obsessed record collector. According to my record database, which is highly accurate, I have about 640 records in my shelf. Records are overly expensive in Finland, so I’m buying a lot of stuff from the Internet, especially Amazon.

But that’s not the complete story. I’ve rated pretty much every record, DVD and book I own, on Amazon.co.uk. That’s a few items over 500 (on Amazon.com, I have about half of that). Naturally Amazon doesn’t have all the Finnish music I’m into, which explains the ever so low number. Even that is not as far as it goes. I have about 13750 (5500 on .com) items marked as not interested. You read it correctly, that’s almost fourteen thousand.

I visit Amazon pretty much every day, and immediately mark any new items I won’t be buying, from Today’s Recommendations, All Recommendations and those Recommended by Browsing History. Usually this isn’t a big amount of clicks, but pretty much every time I add a new item to my Amazon owned list, I’m gonna do more work. And every time I browse at any item on Amazon; .co.uk or .com – I do them both. At the end of the day, I usually have at most 5 items that I’m not going to mark, which means I’ll buy them at some point. At the moment I’m recommended 1-3 items, depending a bit on the day.

Some of the Amazon recommends are still silly; why would I be interested in a coffee machine if I’ve rated a board game? Some of the recommends are pretty good, and I’m recommended almost every new record/item I’m going to buy anyway plus some records, which sometimes raise my interest. All in all, it’s a pretty useful tool for me, also considering I buy a big proportion of my music from Amazon because of their and/or the Marketplace sellers’ low prices.

Sometimes I still wonder though – am I too much into Amazon? Should one really be using the Amazon recommendation system this much? How many marked items do you have?