After a recent trip to Disney World, I have been contemplating purchasing one of the Star Wars cookbooks, but have been too lazy to look online for a copy. Disney World has every Star Wars product imaginable. This assignment has given me a reason to get my online shopping on and actually pay attention to the steps I must go through to retrieve such a literary gem. Both Amazon and ThinkGeek have at least one of the two books. I found Amazon easier because the search bar has a drop down menu where I conveniently selected books and typed in the keywords “star wars cookbook.” Amazon graced my eyes with not only the Wookiee Cookies and other Galactic Recipes, but also the second book, Darth Malt and More Galactic Recipes. I found that the home page was not overwhelming with Amazon pushing products. Also there are multiple ways to easily find what the user wants with both a search bar on the top and a menu on the side with different departments or categories of items that could be purchased on the website. I did not have to “satisfice” because I was presented with multiple viable options that got me to where I hoped to go.

ThinkGeek is always a dangerous website for someone with a short attention span to go to. Though there isn’t a smorgasbord of items on the homepage, the products are just too cool to sometimes fight the urge to click on everything. I found at the bottom of the page, instead of organizing things by category, there were options to choose from popular series or games. I thought this was an appropriate approach for this particular website. On the top everything was organized in categories. Instead of using my first instinct of just using the search bar, I clicked on the fantasy and sci-fi books section to see if I could possibly land upon my desired cookbook series instantaneously. I was delighted to see so many things that sparked my interested, but no dice with the product I wanted. However, the good ol’ trustworthy search bar led me to where I needed to be after I used the same keywords as I did on Amazon. I was surprised to see that ThinkGeek only had the first edition, Wookiee Cookies and other Galactic Recipes. Not only were they lacking in options, but it was more expensive than the price Amazon had to offer.

Overall, I feel that Amazon is a great website if you need to look for something specific, but gives good suggestions for products similar to the one searched. ThinkGeek is good for looking through specialty/odd products if you have the time to “window shop” online.