Don`t sell those Amazon shares yet

CDWeb (

) really looks good. It has a clean design, with enough graphics to keep you interested, but few enough to keep it quick and uncluttered. Its selection of CDs, DVDs and videos are well organised and easy to find, and its search engine is a pleasure to use. So why won`t I buy anything from the site?

Here is a simple experiment. Open CDWeb in one browser window and Amazon.com in another. Notice anything? Amazon has a far larger selection. It has in-your-face content, whereas you need to click through a fiddly little link to get a two-line description on CDWeb. Amazon uses every trick in the book to pull you deeper into its site, while CDWeb`s attitude is best described as laissez faire. "Look for a product if you want to, but we aren`t going to try and sell it to you," the site seems to say.

But that isn`t enough to drive me to Amazon quite yet. A misplaced sense of patriotism will have most people gravitating to the .co.za site. So assume that you find something you like and decide to buy it. Go back to Amazon, and compare the pricing. Even at the exchange rate of 6:1 and with international shipping included, four times out of five Amazon will work out cheaper. Like Kalahari.net and almost every other local e-tailer, CDWeb isn`t about to make a loss on its sales, and will lose out price-wise against Amazon every time.

There is an exception, however. In its popular music section Amazon has a grand total of seven CDs even faintly relating to SA. With its far more extensive selection, CDWeb is ahead of the game, right? It would be, except that local music seems to be the last thing on the CDWeb Webmaster`s mind. You would be hard-pressed to find a South African group in either the new releases or chart toppers sections. It is almost as if the store is embarrassed to try and sell you anything at all - it certainly isn`t about to suggest any title above another.

If you are looking for a hard-to-find audio title it may be worth trying the "request a CD" function, and once you buy something the loyalty programme may be worth a second look. Then again, the only delivery options will have you picking up your parcel from a post office counter. Isn`t the whole point of e-commerce to reduce the hassle of shopping?

So it is probably a lot faster and easier, and cheaper too, to buy from your local music outlet. If you are looking for a rare South African item CDWeb may have something to offer, but that is only conjecture anyway.