
What If Amazon.com Actually Is a Horrible Website? - smacktoward
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katienotopoulos/amazon-website-sucks
======
fingerprinter
I have long held that Amazon(.com) has some of the worst UX I've ever seen,
and it still is able to sell massive amounts to consumers.

We are left to consider that perhaps UX, particularly to the mass market,
really doesn't matter. Or maybe that Amazon has such an entrenched lead,
mindshare or other, it can weather some horrible, horrible experiences.

Considering that AWS is almost identical on the cloud front, I'm not sure
really what to think here.

I'm a programmer. I use cloud services everyday. I have actively stayed away
from AWS in the past few years b/c it has such a bad UX/DX and yet....it
grows.

Azure is better. GCP is better. AWS, when compared to those two objectively,
is downright terrible. Their services are disjoint. Their command lines don't
work together. Their web console? Hooooooollllllly mother of god.....

I guess I don't know what to make of Amazon. Developers seem to fawn over
things like Heroku, Zeit, GitHub and they are hugely successful in their own
right....but still AWS is used by developers and, IMO, it shouldn't be
anymore. It's 2018 and AWS is very clearly stuck in the 1970s/80s DX. They
just don't get it, or maybe they do? And DX doesn't matter to most developers?

If we are honest with ourselves, AWS should be in third place in 2018. And it
shouldn't even be close. Their services are comparable to the point of no real
differentiation to their competition, and they have worse billing, worse
experience, worse DX, worse support and overall worse nearly everything.

And yet they grow.

So yes, Amazon.com and AWS are terrible. And for some reason it doesn't seem
to matter. I would like to live in a world where it does, particularly for
developer tools where I hope that developers have more taste and sense than
the choice of AWS shows.

~~~
tschwimmer
Can't speak to AWS, but I know that the e-commerce side of Amazon.com is A/B
tested to within an inch of its life. They test absolutely everything,
including colors, size, layout, spacing, etc to check for the best conversion
rate. They have a huge team of developers and designers working just on this
site optimization and they're constantly running experiments.

It may not be good UX as measured by some aesthetic standard or set of best
practices, but the site is accomplishing its goal for Amazon and arguably the
consumers who use it.

~~~
nikofeyn
that seems like the google way of building product. you test all these micro
changes but miss out on the macro changes the site actually needs, which
doesn't really work out. no one can argue that amazon has good ux. from
product to product and day to day the website layout changes. each product
site has just a ton of data thrown up on it. it has horrible tracking of
product purchases. for example, if looking at a paperback book, it gives no
indication that you may have purchased the hardcover. it has terrible
management of books that may have multiple editions. buying older books takes
some time because they'll often have multiple pages for the exact same book.
pre-ordering is a mess. i have been sent two video games before because i pre-
ordered a game super early which then apparently got a new product page. i
thought i had never pre-ordered it some time later and amazon didn't mention
it, so i ordered it again since it gave no indication i had ordered that exact
product. the search is not great either. comparing products is non-existent.
just cycling through various options like color can be a chore just to see a
different price.

just because they have a process doesn't mean it works. but yea, like someone
said, i guess the general user doesn't care. i know it has lessened my use of
the site.

~~~
bevax
And there might have well reason to change the small things only, but nothing
fundamentel. People hate change. If they start to turn the website upside
down, their customers would start to whine, and cry, and complain. A lot of
wasted time they could spend with buying stuff.

So, it ugly and bad as hell, but everybody is trained and accustomed to it.
Why risking confusing customers without need?

------
CognitiveLens
Alternative title: "Amazon's web marketplace is so complex that it sometimes
makes unexpected automated up-sell recommendations"

There's not really any news here, other than the fact that managing such a
huge _and extremely effective_ commercial website is difficult even for one of
the most well-resourced tech companies in the world.

If the purpose of an website-that-sells-things is to have carefully tuned UX
for every product page, Amazon.com has some small (although hardly 'horrible')
UX problems. If the purpose is to sell stuff, the article makes it very clear
that for an arbitrarily specific product (bassoon straps), you're extremely
likely to be able to buy one quickly and easily from Amazon.

What if BuzzFeedNews.com is actually... trolling its audience?

~~~
Lkjhmnbv
The rumor was bezos had to sign off on every pixel. Not sure if that's still
true?

~~~
camtarn
Never was when I was there (2010-2013), and I wrote widgets that deployed on
the global website home page.

------
bastawhiz
I've stopped shopping at Amazon for most of the day to day things that I need
for exactly the reasons the author brings up. Paper towels? I'll pay the extra
$1.20 to know that I'm not accidentally buying a 500 pack or ordering from
China and it'll take nine weeks.

The toothbrushes I'm buying on Amazon might be $4 with free shipping but I
immediately question its authenticity. I've bought enough junk that's turned
out to be a scam[0] that it's just easier to buy the same thing in a store. At
least 15% of my one-off purchases have turned out to be regrettable. Hell, I
even poked my head into one of the Facebook groups of sellers and "buyers"
gaming the algorithm to see what it's about, and couldn't be more astounded to
find that _everything_ on Amazon is being gamed. Everything you can buy is
being replaced with knock-off junk.

Amazon's greatest asset, its convenience, has become outweighed by its low
quality bar for me. It's a real disappointment. The massive influx of utter
garbage has made everyday purchases risky, and it's an easy risk to avoid.

[0] I once bought a shirt that was physically impossible to put on for any
human being with a head diameter greater than 10cm.

~~~
zarriak
I think the inherent problem is that no site should be as big as Amazon is
current. It just has insane mindshare. There is a shop 3 miles from the
Buzzfeed offices that has one listed on their website for 37 cents more than
Amazon charges, it seems absurd to me not to go to actual stores when buying
in domains where the employees would have knowledge. Two things are happening:
1.) There are probably millions of searches that don't work. These would work
normally if you asked someone who worked at a brick and mortar store that had
domain experience. 2.) Amazon has half of all online purchases but many of
those are from customer loyalty that was earned in areas that do not
constitute the absolute majority of purchases most people (at least on HN)
make.

Also I went through two years of personal and business Amazon purchases and
literally couldn't remember a time when I had an issue. Especially after the
last HN discussion made about this I realized just how much I still buy in
brick and mortar.

------
ergothus
I see a lot of people talking about how the site sells stuff well, but nothing
about how well it gets you what you want.

Ignore for the moment the counterfeit issues, because those are not a "site"
problem.

I still routinely fail to get what I search for. And then find it i. The "also
bought" of whatever they do send me. Shipping times either lie more often than
not, or are "true" after a seemingly arbitrary number of days between now and
when it ships.

Anything that is deeply categorized (prime day. Prime now, Restaurants, etc)
loses your filtering all the time. This past prime day I had to search through
their pages of deals by hand because their search just failed.

This might well sell a lot of stuff...but like a news article that 8s broken
up into multiple pages to seve me more ads, it is not good at what I want.
Other forces (network effect) keep me there.

~~~
toast0
I've come to the realization that Amazon is very good at optimizing, but what
they're optimizing for is not what I would optimize for and may be less than
obvious. Sort by price for example clearly does something, but it's not
sorting by price, especially if you've filtered down to a single merchant
already.

~~~
DougWebb
I think that price, in the context of a site like Amazon's, deserves one of
those "Wrong things developers believe about X" pages.

Any given item in Amazon's database (where 'item' == 'something that has its
own page') can have multiple variants on color, size, and other varieties.
Each variant may have its own price. So if you want to sort items by price,
which price do you use?

~~~
notatcomputer68
Cheapest usable variation that satisfies the query.

E.g. if I search for a computer it should pick the variation with the cheapest
cpu, not the one with bring-your-own-cpu

~~~
camtarn
You assume that the system has a notion of 'a computer', let alone 'a cpu'.

I occasionally dealt with the Amazon catalogue. It's a great example of
'garbage in, garbage out'.

This is also the reason I never bought computer parts on Amazon, even when I
got a staff discount.

------
kevindong
One thing I really like about Amazon is that they're not pushy about their
mobile app. Anything I can do on my laptop, I can do on mobile web without
them prompting me to download/use their app. Reddit is one of the worst
offenders for this issue.

~~~
0x262d
reddit's mobile site makes me actively want to not use reddit. it's enraging

------
partiallypro
The main reason I've stopped shopping on Amazon so often: Counterfeits.

I'm still a loyal Audible user, I might end up cancelling Prime soon, since I
no longer order from Amazon enough to justify it. I've been a Prime user since
2009, since they were giving for free to students around that time. Now I'll
just walk into Target or Walmart, or if I'm buying a PC/game/console getting
it straight from the OEM such as Microsoft.

~~~
rubatuga
Seems like it is impossible to buy a genuine PS3 controller on Amazon these
days. Amazon is great for delivery, but lacks the tools needed to determine if
a product is genuine or not. It aggregates hundreds of sellers for one product
page, meaning going back and buying the same item from your history may result
in a counterfeit the second time.

~~~
cheeze
Prime now is great for stuff like this, although has to be available in your
area. But yeah I agree, I'd never order an SD card off of Amazon.

------
CM30
Well, I think there are three things to consider here, which explain how
Amazon does so well despite having made some questionable UI/UX decisions in
the past.

1\. Most of the changes/extra features were added piecemeal over the decades,
with the basic site look not really changing all that much in the meantime.

So a lot of the awkward/poorly thought out/non integrated features are there
because that's where it was practical to add them.

2\. Obviously it's a large brand, so people are more forgiving of the design
issues compared to a lesser known competitor. That's why copying the market
leader may not always be the best idea, since the leader can do a lot of
questionable things/make a lot of questionable design/content/whatever
decisions and still have millions of people using their services, whereas a
small company/site with these frustrations will just go ignored/unused.

3\. They A/B test everything, and what the data says is most effective is not
always what a designer would think looks/feels best. Look at some of the best
performing landing pages; many look outright hideous yet convert really well.

------
stock_toaster
What if?!

As a customer, I find that Amazon has some of the worst usability of a
shopping site that I have run across in a while. I think amazon is successful
in /spite/ of their design, certainly not /because/ of it.

~~~
avinium
Personally, I've never had a problem with Amazon's design (though AWS is
another story).

If their design is actually "bad", then my only takeaway is that design isn't
nearly as important as people claim (at least, for this particular industry).

~~~
ajhurliman
Any particular gripes with AWS? Genuinely curious, not defending anything
here.

~~~
avinium
I don't want to trigger a war - honestly, it's probably just personal
preference (and I now almost exclusively work in Azure, so things may have
changed in the last 12-18 months).

My gripe was mainly about the density of the UI elements - it always felt like
there was a lot of text/images crammed into a small space, so I had to inspect
every single option before I found the one I wanted.

People have made similar comments about the Azure portal, though, but I never
felt the same, so YMMV. Like I said, personal preference.

------
gtirloni
I've never considered it a great website but... it works. It sells everything
to everybody. It's bound to become complex. At their scale, I'm afraid we
don't have anything better to compare against (have you used AliExpress?).

~~~
Digital-Citizen
I don't find it hard to identify what's so awful about amazon.com even if
there's currently no other existing website to do the same job at the same
scale:

\- I think that Javascript is widely used needlessly forcing lots of
unnecessary reflows and repaints; this slows down searching and using the
site.

\- I find the searches are broken to the point where it is easier for finding
stuff using another search engine which indexes amazon.com's webpages.

\- I don't like collapsing portions of the webpage (such as long reviews). I'd
rather download simple static markup and scroll through reading what I want
presented to me in the order I've chosen.

\- I don't want to see JS-based image/movie previews; inline images and using
a modern browser's built-in video is much better as those can be styled in the
way the user wants and obey other user-centric preferences as the web ought to
do.

So to me saying 'it works' is putting commercial interests above my user
interface interests and interests I deem more important such as how Amazon
treats its workers. At best I'd say this puts into perspective how overvalued
website development really is for commercial interests and how wildly off the
mark website development is at identifying and building on something simple
and easy to use. I've also found that Amazon purchases are often misleading
(selling used merchandise as new, selling USB keys that hold less than the
advertised storage size, and more) which means more time and money spent not
really knowing what's on offer and higher chance of returning bad merchandise.
All of this taken together means I shop elsewhere.

~~~
camtarn
Two things:

We had a lot of non web developers writing JavaScript. No idea if it's like
that any more, but I can certainly say that that was responsible for some
serious performance sins!

Modern browsers ... hahahahahahaha. I suspect parts of the website still fully
support IE6.

------
chadcmulligan
I used to like the 'Customers who bough .. also bought' feature when browsing
books, this has gone now and replaced by 'Sponsored products related to this
item' which is less relevant, not only that its repeated down the page. The
'also bought' feature is available when you add to your wish list, but only
contains a few items now. It does seem to be becoming less usable, which is a
shame, its always been my go to for finding new reading. There's lots of other
distracting chuff as well now which litters the page.

~~~
fjsolwmv
Is "customers who viewed this also viewed..." not good enough for you?

~~~
thaumasiotes
No, buying something is a much stronger signal than viewing something.

Amazon has picked exactly one low-hanging fruit for recommendations: it
frequently recommends to me that I should buy an item from my wishlist. That
was a good idea on Amazon's part.

But it also frequently recommends books to me based on a book that I
purchased, read, and left a one-star review for. That seems like a pretty
obvious mistake.

~~~
catach
> But it also frequently recommends books to me based on a book that I
> purchased, read, and left a one-star review for. That seems like a pretty
> obvious mistake.

The reasoning might be that the bad-review signal means that you found the
book to be a low-quality instance of its type, not that you discovered that
you disliked all of that type.

Unless you're being recommended books by the same author, I suppose.

~~~
thaumasiotes
I am being recommended books by the same author.

------
crooked-v
To quote @kibblesmith: "Amazon is a $250 billion dollar company that reacts to
you buying a vacuum by going THIS GUY LOVES BUYING VACUUMS HERE ARE SOME MORE
VACUUMS"

~~~
scarface74
Sadly enough, I’ve bought four Roku TVs from Amazon. Three forcour house and
one for my dad.

~~~
unwiredben
Thanks! (actual Roku TV software engineer)

~~~
scarface74
Well, don’t take that as an unqualified endorsement of Roku...

The Roku software is top notch. It’s amazing what you all have done to
optimize the software to run on really low end hardware. I’ve also heard good
things about the SDK. I listened to a podcast interview of your CEO and he
said that using low end hardware was a business decision to keep the cost down
for the OEMs where the margins were already razor thin.

That being said, I hate Roku’s business model. From the same interview he said
that Roku isn’t in the hardware business or for that matter even in the
software business. It’s business model is collecting user data to sell to
advertising.

Everything about that business model is irritating to me - from the remote
with hard coded buttons to services that no one would choose - like CBS News
and the defunct Rdio service to the ad that takes up half the screen.

I have a 4K AppleTV connected to the one TV we use most frequently and I
replaced the Roku stick I had in my home gym with another ATV 4K.

The Roku business model is everything I hate about the consumer electronics
business model outside of Apple. I like simple transactions - I give the
company enough money to profitably stay in business and they give me stuff.

That being said, if my other two non Roku TVs in my house ever need replacing,
I would replace them with RokuTVs. The interface is great, the TCL Roku TVs
are dirt cheap, the mobile apps are great and Roku has a history of keeping
their software up to date. I couldn’t recommend that most people buy an $199
4K AppleTV box when you can buy a $399 55 inch Roku TV from Amazon.

------
plandis
Amazon does extensive testing for the main retail site. If it seems counter
intuitive I can still almost guarantee you it’s either a test to see if it
increases revenue or has been shown to increase revenues.

~~~
rileymat2
Lots of things can bump short term revenues in an A/B test, but leave long
term unhappiness.

------
ldarby
The constant popups asking me to signup for Prime, with obvious dark patterns
that twice tricked me into clicking 'ok' put me off buying from them
altogether.

~~~
touristtam
ublock and dark reader.

------
astura
I am selling a product on Amazon that has two colors, black and white. Somehow
the pictures got mixed up: the white version has pictures of the black version
and vice versa. It was once correct, so I don't know what happened.

I've been fighting with seller support for about two weeks to get this fixed.
First they said they need a link to the manufacturer's website for the product
(!?) Then when I gave them the link they said I need to upload the new
pictures myself (!?) So I did, I downloaded the pictures from the manufacturer
website and uploaded the black pictures on the black version and the white
pictures on the white version. Now they've just been sending me messages every
few days saying "we are still working on this issue." This is for a real
simple fix, not some sort of complicated issue, but it's a big issue if a
customer doesn't know what they are getting, this should be priority one.

~~~
NullPrefix
>This is for a real simple fix

How would you know? The result is "simple error", but the cause could be deep
down in their backend.

------
midnightdiesel
There’s no “what if” about it. Amazon.com’s UX has always been chock full of
dark design patterns and incongruous UI choices. The same is true to varying
degrees for many of their platforms and products. It’s not really a huge deal,
although it is one of the big reasons I don’t feel like Amazon is very
trustworthy.

~~~
camtarn
I find it very sad. I used to work on the team that rendered the front page
'customers also bought' ads, and we were incredibly serious about avoiding
dark patterns. We even had a training programme to make sure we knew the
personalization principles - erring on the side of over informing the
customer, etc.

As a random dev in a different dept, I even got the first iteration of the
Amazon app's notification ads pulled temporarily. They were badly implemented
(they advertised a product, but linked to something different, and there was
no obvious way to turn them off), I felt they reflected badly on the company,
so I filed a ticket and it actually got listened to.

All that's gone out the window now. Every time I see the Prime clickthroughs,
credit card deals, 'lightning deals' which are only about 20c off the normal
discount, etc, it makes me grind my teeth.

~~~
FakeComments
My favorite is the fake menu on the homepage: the Prime “menu”, ie word with
arrow, always shows an ad, no matter if you’re a member or not.

------
jackvalentine
The design becomes particularly frustrating if you're not in the country
you're trying to buy from. They don't make it particularly easy to filter
"will ship to my country" and more than one occasion I find myself clicking
check out only to be told nope.

~~~
acjohnson55
Yeah, likewise, the lack of arrival date filtering is pretty annoying.

------
will_pseudonym
This doesn't seem to be a complaint about Amazon's website exactly, but about
buying options/shipping prices/etc being out of whack with the nature of the
products. If the NY Times had an option to buy a single article for $1000,
that's not an issue with their website, it's a mistake in pricing. Not to say
that these aren't mistakes; they are. It's a reduction in the quality of their
offering as a marketplace, reducing the signal:noise ratio by offering
products/services that no sane person would want. The more things that you
have to wade through that don't make sense, the more frustrating the shopping
experience will be.

------
jammygit
My 2 cents on the cloud front is that I never did learn to find my around GCP,
and could not even find out how to sign up for Azure 2 years ago. AWS was easy
to navigate, and the others were bewildering.

Maybe it would be different now that I know my way around these things, but
the only really usable cloud services I've seen were DO & AWS (DO was the
simplest).

edit - I wonder why my experience has felt so different from everyone else. I
use AWS in part now because its so easy to work with (besides the billing
page)

------
Flozzin
I dislike their video portion of their website. They have no history that I
can ever find. And they don't have a recently watched section. If you don't
finish a movie or show, or are watching a series, there is no easy way to get
back to it without having to search for it. Hulu and Netflix both have a
recently watched or continue watching section.

I often find a random docu-series on Amazon and completely forget I was
enjoying it or what the name was when I want to go re-find it.

------
NightlyDev
I do agree that the page is terrible, but it clearly converts.

I often wonder if I made a good desicion after purchasing something. That
doesn't happen with Amazon, instead I'm just happy that I don't have to use
that shitty page more.

------
wink
I'm pretty sure it just got worse over the years.

I was visiting amazon.de (not .com) yesterday and 50% of what I saw had
article names/descriptions like eBay 10 years ago. "desk light white awesome
whatever keyword buy". Then I looked at the Audio CDs and sorted by price, and
everything was 0 - XX €, yeah - because I was logged in apparently some of the
music I can stream for free. Totally interesting to me if I deliberately visit
the AUDIO CD section. Also not sure if it still sorted by price or not,
because for sure the first 3 pages were all 0.

------
rdl
Maybe Amazon should let users opt in to “amazon labs” UX experiments around
the core shopping experience. I’d love to be part of a trial which merged
kindle store, physical books, a scanning service, a concierge “shop for hard
to find books”, periodicals, and bespoke reports (and maybe my own business
documents), all behind something like a next generation Goodreads. Similarly a
vertical-focused camera or drone store, travel/services, etc.

------
sxp62000
The amazon website is horrible, but it's fast and they have the lowest prices
(or at least they make it seem like so). Also, they show all the relevant
information that you need to purchase different sorts of products. For
example, let's say you search for a Fujifilm lens. When you open the product
page, it instantly shows you a way to check if the lens will actually fit your
camera, I love that stuff! ... and the reviews, how do they get people to
write reviews for even the most obscure things?

------
victor106
Off topic: I watched[1] this recently where Larry Ellison talks about
Amazon.com still using Oracle DB and that when they tried to stop using Oracle
they had huge problems.

Anyone know to what extent Amazon.com still uses Oracle DB? I know they said
they would be completely off Oracle by 2020. Is Oracle really that good for
mission critical applications that no open source DB can match?

[1] [https://youtu.be/xrzMYL901AQ](https://youtu.be/xrzMYL901AQ)

~~~
NicoJuicy
They recently migrated everything away from Oracle and have tools for others
now.

The problems were mostly associated with Oracle specific syntax or
implementations, nothing else

------
monochromatic
Often the best way to find what I’m looking for is to google the product with
“site:amazon.com”. That’s not a great endorsement of their search
functionality.

------
agentofoblivion
You’d think they would have at least one smart person like you guys in their
300,000 employees to make these obvious fixes to solve all their problems.

------
MisterTea
Similar gripe: you want to buy a water bottle holder. You find one you like in
terms of design and price. Comes in a two pack. A two pack. Of bicycle water
bottle holders. Who the hell wants a two pack of bicycle water bottle holders?
Amazingly I humorously griped about it in a group chat with friends and
someone needed a water bottle holder. Two packs...

~~~
iad
Most bikes have mounting points for two bottle holders. If you're going to be
riding for over an hour you'll probably need two bottles unless you have
somewhere to refill during the ride.

------
mikelward
Their search results are horrendous.

In the past year, I've almost bought:

    
    
      - a USB-A cable instead of a USB-C cable
      - a Pixel 2 XL case instead of a Pixel 2 case
      - a sink strainer instead of a sink stopper
    

All because searching for the latter also includes results for the former.

------
thrower123
The one that gets me is that the "Add to list" button seems to be in three or
four different places when you look at the page for an item, and I have to
hunt for it. I tend to bookmark a lot of books and such with the wishlist, and
go back when my Amazon Chase card has reward points built up.

------
dwighttk
It is the worst website that can successfully sell a lot of things to a lot of
people.

------
alistproducer2
My biggest complaint with Amazon is the site is slow even on my powerful
desktop.

------
brownbat
I found one of the linked articles more interesting than the main one. Ten
years of changes in the retail sector by firm size:

[http://digg.com/2017/amazon-vs-walmart-size](http://digg.com/2017/amazon-vs-
walmart-size)

The pace and scale is even more dramatic than I thought.

Rising interest rates and a big jump in expiring retail sector bonds could
make 2019 an especially difficult year:

[https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-retail-
debt/](https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-retail-debt/)

The potential impacts are hard to fathom.

> The job losses in retail could have unexpected social and political
> consequences, as huge numbers of low-wage retail employees become
> economically unhinged, just as manufacturing workers did in recent decades.
> About one out of every 10 Americans works in retail.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/15/business/retail-
industry....](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/15/business/retail-
industry.html)

That article makes it sound like all of suburbia is one giant manufacturing
town, and the plant is about to close. The first link makes it look like we
somehow decided to ditch the entire sector and just give it over entirely to
Amazon and Walmart.

