While shopping for some thoroughly boring audiovisual cables at Amazon, I found myself in need of a particular kind of connector. They had plenty of the connectors listed, many of them for under $5, but all of the products were from other stores, rather than Amazon itself. In the end, I couldn’t place the order even if I wanted to, since Amazon didn’t stock the related items that I needed.

This would have been a perfect opportunity for a “Request a product” feature. Besides just mining my site usage history to guess at my intent, Amazon could have given me the opportunity to tell them what I was looking for and why the existing options weren’t sufficient. Sure, only a small percentage of customers would take advantage of this sort of feedback mechanism. But the information they did collect would be invaluable in helping decide which new products to carry in the future.