commerce

My wife just received a new Bank of America debit card and managed to persuade me to activate the card by calling the number on the sticker. In the past, this was usually a simple and painless procedure: enter the card number, the expiration date, and the last 4 digits of the SSN, and you were all set. But this time, I almost couldn’t believe my ears. While the activation was supposedly being processed, I had to endure 4 lengthy and annoying advertisements for credit reports and similar services, before I finally got the confirmation that the activation was successfully completed....

If you’ve ever been annoyed at how difficult it can be to get a customer support representative on the line instead of having to navigate through levels and levels of automated voice systems, this might be for you: gethuman cheats. The comprehensive list of phone numbers includes many banks, retailers, manufacturers, airlines, phone and other utility companies, and more. (via BoingBoing)

Once more, Gmail released a bunch of new features. I am particularly excited about the new Gmail Shortcuts. These show up on the right hand side of the page, right above the sponsored links, when Gmail was able to parse a mailing address or a tracking number from the email. I order a lot of items at Amazon and other online stores, and while the shipping confirmations generally contain tracking numbers (at least for UPS and FedEx), they usually don’t link directly to the respective package tracking pages....

Ken Adams left a comment for my previous posting about my CafePress store and recommended that I check out Spreadshirt instead. After checking out their website, I am pretty impressed. Spreadshirt operates pretty much the same way as CafePress, which means that you can either create a design for yourself and order your own items, or you can open your own virtual store and sell items at a markup. They seem to have a slightly smaller selection of miscellaneous items than CafePress, but in return they offer far more colors for their T-Shirts....

When I went to Amazon a few minutes ago, I was presented with a memo from Jeff Bezos, introducing the new Amazon Prime service. This sounds like an excellent idea, and certainly one that I’m bound to benefit from. Amazon Prime requires a yearly membership fee of $79, for which you get free second day shipping on most items. You can also upgrade to overnight shipping for $3.99 per item. We order from Amazon all the time and definitely spend more on shipping than $79, even though we often take advantage of the free (but slow…) super saver shipping....