Amos Publications Is Completely, Utterly Useless.

revenuecollector opened up a very sore subject, but I hope venting his spleen for us here has made him feel much better.

Earlier this year, I posted a long litany of my research to compare available US Hingeless Albums. At the time I knew nothing about what hingeless album products were available, or the differences, pros & cons between the various manufacturers.

After visiting every album manufacturer website I could track down, it became obvious that the stamp collection industry was very guilty of refusing to change its traditional business models to take full advantage of digital and Internet technologies. This reluctance makes it nearly impossible to go online and review all the product details a buyer expects access to in 2015.

Most of the manufacturer websites are nearly useless when it comes to illustrating, explaining, and accurately presenting their available products. Searching for my expensive hingeless album set became a major project lasting several months. While we can review online every design detail and every available option for a $35,000 automobile, it is impossible to determine what types of hingeless mounts are applied on $450 stamp albums.

I ended up requesting sample pages be mailed to me from each manufacturer under consideration.

However, all stamp collectors should be thankful that ebay built and maintains a world-class web environment. By and large, I have had an excellent technical user experience buying and selling on ebay. But of course ebay was not designed for the stamp community. It was developed as a smart buyer-meets-seller marketplace.

If the Amos and Gibbons folks remain profitable with crap web businesses, they may not have much motivation to improve their online functionality. Maybe most of their sales are derived from wealthy top-tier collectors who remain comfortable with print catalogs, phone calls to an account rep, faxes and snail mail?

dcaraz

I think we need to separate, at least in Gibbons's case, its web business as a whole (which is not impressive) and its non-hard copy catalogues - see apastuszak's comments above, for instance.

Geoff

I agree with 51studabaker's projection of future Amos options.
I was not actively collecting until I re-engaged in 2010. So not having been familiar with the digital and Internet impact on collecting, I wasn't aware of the slow adoption by leading stamp companies.
But as a major publisher of stamp collecting pricing literature, specialized catalogs and albums,
the management of Amos should have developed a business strategy by 2010 to build the best online tools in order to maintain the company's leadership position. Since that train has left the station, it would appear logical that Amos may very well be forced as Don said to either merge with a technically savvy partner, or divest their trademarks, copyrights, and intellectual property to the highest bidder.

I still rely on Scott print catalog as my primary reference. I find it quick and easy to locate items. Amos doesn't tab their books, but I add my own in order to quickly find BOB, Revenues, Airmail, etc. Today, I wonder what % of all collectors prefer online references rather than print catalogs?

I have been following the dialog, and one general long term concern of status quo for me is that bringing new collectors into the hobby will become increasingly difficult. Particularly if needed information to engage with the hobby, and some might argue that albums are a major component, is not accessible using modern modes of technology.

It is amazing that entire books have been written, and digitized, on a specific single stamp. But information on supplies is so lacking... all seem to be running on outdated poorly functioning technology platforms.

Of course those in the know (it took me 20 years to find SCF), can come here and keyword search and get the needed guidance. Thank goodness for that!

Geez, revenuecollector, that's terrible customer care by Amos!
I don't subscribe to the digital products, but I'd be boiling mad as well if I did.

Being down for a week...or even offering that time frame as a possible excuse...can be done only by a company, as ArtfulHinger indicated, that has NO competition. I wonder what would constitute an acceptable alternative to the Scott numbering system that would not infringe on Amos' copyright?

Has anyone called Amos to ask when they expect their site to be back up? Doubt they'd respond with an honest answer if things are as bad as I fear but just wondering.

This must be an absolute disaster. It's just at the time a lot of their customer base would be going on there to browse for holiday ideas.

It is back online, but the performance is unGodly slow. They are obviously having ongoing technical issues.

They probably had a hard time finding replacement parts for that 25 year old 386-based server they're running their operations on.

www.amosadvantage.com is still down, now for 10 days.
I had placed an order on Wed., Oct. 14. I called this Wed., the 4th and was told they couldn't tell me the status of my order and they were hoping that the website would be operational by Thursday the 5th.

There is a garage sale in my community tomorrow. I will keep my eyes peeled for any 386-based server parts for Amos.

[sarcasm]'Cuz springing for a decent hosting service service is soooooo expensive. [/sarcasm] Dear sweet Jesus, I think they almost take some kind of perverse pride in being so technically backward. Too bad they don't know it's not actually cute to the rest of us.

Hopefully they at least have the business sense to figure out how much an episode like this costs them and then compare it to the cost of a real, long-term solution. I find it hard to believe that the solution would be more expensive than the costs of a couple of weeks of lost business, especially given the wealth of affordable options that are available to them.

This is crazy. I mean I know Amos likes to pride itself as being based in a quaint small town, but really. Sidney OH is less than 2 hrs away from either Cincinnati or Columbus. It's not like they would need to ship things to Tristan da Cunha or something to get their system back up.

Well, you know it's going to take the part-time janitor/IT director awhile to restore everything from the 8-inch floppy disks they had everything backed up on. And of course Microsoft hasn't supported DOS 2.0 in quite some time, so there's that to contend with. And don't forget that those 300-baud modems can be hard to find these days.

/snark

Actually a 386 might be too advanced, they are probably still on a 286.

My bad. I thought they discontinued Framemaker and PageMaker and InDesign replaced them both. I have never used FrameMaker. How is it as a DTP app?