Amazon has done the right thing here, they put a public apology on their front page of their site, not any old small apology either, it’s huge and it’s designed to really push the point across.

Why? Well its good business, actually, it’s really good business, happy customers are customers that are repeat buyers, on top of that happy customers also give good word of mouth referrals, as opposed to unhappy customers that do the opposite.

On top of that by putting the message out there publicly they are also taking a load of support.

Amazon are having a real issue manufacturing enough of their kindle book readers to keep up with demand, rather than dealing with a large number of support questions every day from customers wondering where their kindle is, they have put out the message to their existing customers who have purchased one, to everyone else who might buy one and to the general public that they are aware of the issue and are committed to doing the most that they can to fix it.

It’s a win for the support team – inquiries will go down.

It’s a win for people waiting for their kindle, they have some news on what’s going on and they know Amazon is working on the issue.

It’s a win for Amazon – it shows potential kindle buyers that even though there’s no stock right now, that Amazon are committed to increasing their output and are committed to supporting their customers.

And It’s an additional win for Amazon, even though that large image took away every product on the front page that would generate tens of thousands in sales typically it shows that Amazon cares about their customers more than making sales, it shows that there IS support, where most other companies really lack support and it shows that Amazon isn’t afraid to tell their customers the truth, not make up BS stories to buy more time.

I doubt that it would have hurt sales anyway; people would still search the site and do their usual shopping.