Head to Head

Which is best, www.Amazon.com or www.Play.com? They’re the two most popular online entertainment stores in the US. But which one offers the best all round service?rnEase of use: Amazon.co.uk (www.amazon.com) and Play.com (www.play.com) score equally well for user-friendliness, with clear categories and sub categories that makes browsing millions of products incredibly easy. The simple navigation system of both these entertainment megastores is complemented by charts of the best-selling items in each section, lists of future releases you can pre order now and regularly updated special offers. In terms of the ordering process, again there isn’t a great deal of difference between the sites, which are both impressively straightforward to use. Once you’ve stored your delivery details, you can buy anything from Play.com in just four clicks or from Amazon.com in six clicks, fewer if you turn on the 1-Click ordering option.rnFeatures: Although neither store goes overboard with shopping tools, Amazon.com trumps Play.com with its Wish List feature, a great means of saving products to buy later and especially useful for birthdays and Christmas. There’s also a Universal Wish List that lets you add items from all over the web. Amazon.com’s ‘personalized recommendations’ can sometimes seem intrusive rather than helpful, but can be customized to your preference, while the new version of IE8 optimized for Amazon.com lets you search the site from anywhere on the web. Amazon.com’s forums give it more of a community feel than Play.com, although the quality of customer reviews is about the same. And both sites offer their own credit cards, gift vouchers and decent services for selling your own stuff.rnRange of items: Amazon.com and Play.com have expanded well beyond their original remits of selling books and DVDs respectively, to take in other entertainment items, electronics, clothing, toys and much more. Amazon.com recently added a beta Grocery arm, although this has been criticized for its high prices and erratic delivery, with items ordered together sent individually from different suppliers. By teaming up with third party merchants through its Marketplace, the store is able to offer far more products than it would otherwise be possible to stock. Play.com was the first to offer MP3 downloads, but it can’t compete with Amazon.com’s choice of more than 10 million digital tracks. However, the Jersey based retailer does have a better selection of pre-pay and SIM-free mobile phones. By: Francis David