I recently wrote a piece on Amazon’s tech book store blog to promote the book. It turns out that Amazon use many of the design patterns in the book, and mostly for good (or at least commercial) purposes rather than with evil intent.
Breakage is the industry term for the dollar value of unredeemed prepaid items. Breakage can be big business for retailers who offer gift cards. Gift cards are a win-win proposition for retailers. Customers tend to either never redeem gift cards they have been given, redeem only part of the card, or spend an additional 15–40 percent in the process of redeeming the card.
That meant I could draw from Amazon’s own site to create examples for the blog entry. You can read the whole thing here. Do you think I was being too sycophantic?