
Google AMP is bad for e-commerce - themaveness
https://thirtybees.com/blog/amp-is-bad-for-e-commerce/
======
kinkrtyavimoodh
Despite understanding and largely agreeing with the concerns against AMP Cache
that get discussed any time an AMP article gets posted on HN, I cannot stress
enough on how relieved I feel to see the lightning icon next to a mobile
search result, especially on my now aging phone.

Most content websites have become such a massive crapfest of ad-bloat, bad UX,
huge page sizes and general usability hell that it's nigh impossible that I'd
be able to reach the actual content of a non AMP site in the first 5-10
seconds of clicking on its link. (On my phone that's an additional 1-2 seconds
for registering the tap, and 1-2 seconds for navigating to the browser)

My click-throughs to non AMP websites have reduced considerably.

So say what you may, AMP (or FB Instant or its ilk) will prosper until the
mobile web experience stops being so crappy.

(Edit: About a decade ago, when mobile browsers were in their infancy and data
plans were slow and limited, I distinctly remember using Opera Mini for mobile
browsing because it used to pre-render pages on the server and send a very
light payload to the phone. This saved you both data costs and made mobile
browsing even realistically possible)

~~~
dividuum
Personally I don't think the idea behind AMP is bad. But the implementation is
dangerous as it artificially fragments the web. I guess fewer would oppose AMP
if google made some machine verifiable guidelines for "light" webpages that
would earn them this "icon". Linked from the "fat" page by some "link" meta
tag.

~~~
godot
>if google made some machine verifiable guidelines for "light" webpages that
would earn them this "icon". Linked from the "fat" page by some "link" meta
tag.

That is exactly what AMP is; with the exception (a huge one, I know) that
Google also then caches the page on their server and serves it from a
google.com host.

~~~
avaer
For Google, the hijack is the prime feature; AMP is the PR vehicle that makes
it swallow.

AMP could have been done without the huge exception, but then Google couldn't
profit from it.

~~~
claudiulodro
The fast, non-blocking content loading is the main feature. I took a radical
path when developing my site and made it AMP-first. Instead of having an AMP
version of each page, every page is its own AMP version because it's an AMP
page.

Even served from my cheapo shared web host and not Google's AMP cache, I have
pretty-much instant loading of all pages:
[http://multithreaded.link/2017/08/lyft-customer-
acquisition-...](http://multithreaded.link/2017/08/lyft-customer-acquisition-
costs-decrease-uber-stumbles/)

It's a good framework for building super fast pages. I will admit it's a
little riskier to build a site on top of technology a large company owns, but
this is a risk that you also have when you use React or other frameworks.

~~~
kmoe
Your "About", "Contact", and "Privacy Policy" footer links don't work (they go
to "#").

~~~
claudiulodro
Yeah sorry about that! I just launched it recently so I'm still getting
everything going. :)

------
ucaetano
The author seems to completely misunderstand the point of AMP. It was never
designed or created for dynamic, interactive content, especially e-commerce.

This is like complaining that a hammer is bad for driving screws.

~~~
themaveness
I don't think its that. Its that AMP is borderline an anti-trust. But the
point is, even with the speed and possible ranking boost, does it boost
conversions? More traffic without conversions generally does not help an
e-commerce site.

~~~
ucaetano
> Its that AMP is borderline an anti-trust.

And why is that?

> More traffic without conversions generally does not help an e-commerce site.

You should not be using AMP for e-commerce, at least not for anything but a
static product page.

Again, if you try to drive a nail with a hammer and it doesn't work, the fault
isn't on the hammer, it's on you.

~~~
kuschku
> And why is that?

Because you only get a ranking boost if your page

> contains a <script async
> src="[https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js"></script>](https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js"></script>)
> tag inside their head tag.

and

> is allowed to be cached in the Google AMP cache

~~~
cramforce
As the otherwise pretty wrong article correctly states: There is no such
ranking boost.

~~~
rhizome
Not even for Google News purposes? That's 90% of the AMP links I see.

~~~
cramforce
Was talking about Google Search. Don't know about News. But the original
article was about e-commerce.

~~~
gertef
What if your ecommerce is fronted by news or blog?

~~~
cramforce
News shows up in the Top Stories carousel, not all blogs. If the news is so
newsworthy the Top Stories carousel is the right space.

~~~
kuschku
Not correct.

Just look at this example:
[http://i.imgur.com/84FvZmA.png](http://i.imgur.com/84FvZmA.png) Notice how
the news carousel is completely unrelated, and the pages do not otherwise show
up in the search.

Also notice the awesome bug in Google where "Nazi flag" returns "Flag of
Germany".

~~~
cramforce
Oh, certainly for English results showing news results for that query is very,
very relevant given what is going on in the US with people waving actual nazi
flags. You can see that if you e.g. search for a flag that isn't in the news
(like danish flag) there is no news result.

I'll report the flag bug.

~~~
kuschku
You’d think so. But many blogs and ecommerce sites have started dressing their
content up so that it ends up in that carousel, even if it’s not actually
relevant.

Google always ends up putting news from a sailing event from last year in that
carousel when I search stuff about my city. Especially awesome in Google News
& Weather, where 90% of the news are from last year.

Google seems to just displays the top X search results that happen to be AMP,
no matter how old they actually are.

That said, an antitrust complaint was filed with the EU anyway, so we can all
just hope your employer is forced to end AMP sooner rather than later, and we
can all replace it with a solution that doesn’t rely on any single group’s
implementation.

------
dbg31415
Conceptually I hate AMP. I wish they would just have guidelines for fast load
times, and award better rank and a lightening badge next to pages that are
adhering to those guidelines. I HATE that Google restricts design, re-formats
pages, and serves your content.

That said, AMP clearly isn't for eCommerce. You want dynamic, personalized
content for eCommerce. Recommendations based on past pages visited, or search
terms, or your location... It's not just about fast loading pages.

Some eCommerce may fear that their sales will suffer if someone else gets a
page that's in AMP and then Google's new rankings put that page over their
own... But that's no reason to convert your site to AMP. It's a good reason to
build out landing pages specific for search terms, do paid advertising around
keywords, and just generally market your products / site.

Generally speaking, people who come in to product pages straight from Google
are just doing price comparison anyway -- it's just a step in the decision
journey, but if you've done a proper job of marketing your business, customers
that buy tend to go straight to your site and do a search using your own
search tools.

------
roneythomas6
Why would you build your whole site on AMP??? Please read this before think
about build AMP. [https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/12/progressive-web-
amp...](https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/12/progressive-web-amps/)

~~~
kuschku
> Why would you build your whole site on AMP???

To get a ranking boost? For some search terms, moving to full AMP gives you a
ranking boost catapulting you from page 13 or worse to the #1 result. So if
you don’t use that, someone else will use that advantage.

~~~
roneythomas6
Guardian for example runs their own AMP cache and gets in page 1 without
Google AMP cache. Also AMP is one in many factors that is used to decide site
relevance. Amazon and many other sites that don't use AMP gets featured in
page 1 on mobile.

~~~
kuschku
The guardian may run their own CDN, but all guardian search results in Google
Search redirect to the Google AMP cache.

For example, current #1 result for "guardian" is
[https://www.google.de/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2017/a...](https://www.google.de/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/16/grace-
mugabe-zimbabwe-south-africa-diplomatic-immunity)

------
andy_ppp
AMP is fine. AMP Cache is embrace, extended and break the web in fairly
fundamental ways.

~~~
roneythomas6
Cloudflare provides AMP cache. If you don't want to use Google CDN.

~~~
superkuh
Cloudflare's AMP cache is even worse. If someone goes to a website
behind/rehosted on Cloudflares AMP that has a link from that site to a third
party site (say, yours or mine) that third party site will be spidered and
also rehosted on Cloudflare AMP.

Then when someone goes to the intentionally Cloudflare AMP site and clicks
through to your site your actual domain never gets the hit. Instead all
traffic remains within Cloudflare and you never see it.

Additionally, after 2 months of trying to contact anyone at Cloudflare about
this exact situation happening with the most popular page on my domain (saw
the cloudflare AMP bot in the logs) I still can't get a real person. Their
support is attrocious.

~~~
Pxtl
Get a lawyer. They're copying your content and misrepresenting a link to their
site as yours.

------
cramforce
"AMP does not allow for use of forms". This is wrong
[https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/components/amp-
for...](https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/components/amp-form)

…and similarly the rest of the article seems badly researched.

~~~
Navarr
The biggest key to me was the complete ignorance of why a pagespeed might be
higher despite "overall load time" being slower.

Perhaps, author, because of how those pages are painted

------
benmarks
There's a whole lot wrong with this article. Chief for me is the absolute
ignorance around AMP -> PWA flow and browser-native payments API:
[https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2016/07/payment-
re...](https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2016/07/payment-request)

This tech may seem trivial to broadband users, but has demonstrated itself to
be effective in mobile-heavy, low-bandwidth markets (ref India & myntra.com)

------
linopolus
So AMP is not even faster than other mobile pages without the google CDN? A
pity so many prefer something like AMP to generally stripping down their
sites. Get rid of JS unless absolutely necessary, compress/remove images,
remove all this ad and bloat, and your page, whatever category it fits in,
will load blazyingly fast. What happened to good old sole HTML and CSS, served
statically or server-generated for lightning speed?

~~~
acdha
It's not only not faster but it's often slower — AMP puts 100KB of render-
blocking JavaScript into the critical path. If you can render a page with less
than that, you're likely to beat it, which I see regularly on iOS.

~~~
squeaky-clean
Not only that, but because of the limitations of AMP, many AMP sites are
getting slower and slower as they attempt workarounds. I've seen many sites
recently that do section headers as a large image-as-text, I'd guess because
they want to use a custom font? Even worse is AMP won't load images until
you've scrolled them into view.

------
JoshMnem
AMP is terrible for the decentralized, open Web in general.

------
gregable
Breaking down a few of the concerns in this article:

> With AMP [chat applications] cannot be used

True currently. There are no chat application amp extensions, yet. This could
change in the future. Vendors interested in implementing one for AMP should
get involved at
[http://github.com/ampproject/amphtml](http://github.com/ampproject/amphtml)

> AMP does not have any markup specific to checkouts

Most web pages move from shopping cart to payment by changing URLs. This would
work just fine with an AMP page. There is in fact at least one vendor who has
integrated payments with AMP already:
[https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/components/amp-
acc...](https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/components/amp-access-
laterpay)

Also take a look at
[https://ampbyexample.com/advanced/payments_in_amp/](https://ampbyexample.com/advanced/payments_in_amp/)

> AMP does not allow for use of forms

See [https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/components/amp-
for...](https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/components/amp-form)

> They really do not support a logged in state, or user preferences. Things
> like recommended products, or recently viewed products will not work with an
> AMP page. None of the personalization aspects like “Hi, Lesley” are done
> with AMP.

See the (perhaps poorly named)
[https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/components/amp-
lis...](https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/components/amp-list) This
supports loading content specific to the user, even on a cached amp document.

> if search and filtering are a large part of your site’s mobile navigation,
> AMP will be useless.

This is exactly what amp-bind was built for:
[https://ampbyexample.com/components/amp-
bind/](https://ampbyexample.com/components/amp-bind/)

> Google Analytics is not supported on AMP

Google Analytics is fully supported in AMP. Here's the Google Analytics
support page:
[https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...](https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/amp-
analytics/)

> If you use a different suite of tracking such as Piwik or kissmetrics, they
> will not work with AMP.

There is a large list of analytics vendors that have direct support here:
[https://www.ampproject.org/docs/guides/analytics/analytics-v...](https://www.ampproject.org/docs/guides/analytics/analytics-
vendors)

Other vendors can be added with a small amount of configuration. Here's a
guide for Piwik, for example: [https://www.elftronix.com/guide-to-using-piwik-
analytics-wit...](https://www.elftronix.com/guide-to-using-piwik-analytics-
with-amp-on-wordpress/)

Alternatively, vendors can submit a configuration to the AMP project which is
just a few lines of JSON, then the vendor will be supported more directly.

> Ad Revenue is Decreased

The link is to a single article from a year ago. There are many studies
pointing to the opposite effect as well.

> A/B testing is not supported

See [https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/components/amp-
exp...](https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/components/amp-experiment)

> Performance

I'm not sure what URLs the author used, but I tried to find a similar
overstock recliner page that might be the right one. I found:

[https://www.overstock.com/Home-
Garden/Recliners/Leather,/mat...](https://www.overstock.com/Home-
Garden/Recliners/Leather,/material,/18555/subcat.html)

The author tries to use a google.com/amp URL, but these redirect when not
coming from a search click. Much easier is to take the CDN amp URL, which is
served the same way:

[https://cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.overstock.com/Home-
Garden...](https://cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.overstock.com/Home-
Garden/Recliners/amp/Leather,/material,/18555/subcat.html)

I loaded both of these in Chrome, simulated a mobile device, network tab, and
throttling with Fast 3G. Here were my results:

* non-AMP: 42 requests, 1.1 MB transferred, Finish: 10.3s, DomContentLoad: 3.38s, Load: 9.52s

* AMP: 35 requests, 408 KB transferred, Finish 5.87s, DomContentLoaded 1.28s, Load: 5.88s

The AMP page is 60% smaller and hits the load event in 40% less time. However
"loaded" is a funny term in the world of javascript driven websites and needs
to be looked at more carefully.

I suspect that the author's referenced tool is reporting "fully loaded time"
as the time that the last network event ended. AMP pages intentionally delay
loading images below the fold to prioritize visible content. This results in
some images loading later without impacting the user experience. For example,
as I scrolled in the AMP page, the "Finish" time would move ahead to a new
time as new images were loaded. With events like analytics triggers, looking
at the time the last network event finished is typically a misleading metric
and won't work correctly with most amp documents.

If you load filmstrips in Chrome's Performance Tab, you can see this more
clearly. Filmstrips display what the page looked like at snapshots in time
after loading starts. For my quick test with network throttling, the non-AMP
page takes a little over 6s to finish reaching it's final state and the AMP
page takes about 2.2s. So AMP here is nearly 3x faster as the user would
perceive it on similar connection speed.

------
k__
Privacy issues aside, I don't get AMP, most of the time it doesn't even work
right and I'm using chrome on my android tablet.

It either doesn't load or goes back to the previous page after a few seconds.

------
taytus
Disclaimer: I'm working on ROBOAMP (an AMP generator)

AMP has limitations, like any piece of technology. Once you understand the
limitations you should be able to plan your attack accordingly.

We are pre-launch but if you want early access and test our automatic
generator please email me.

------
nouveau0
Should have stopped at Google AMP is bad.

------
droopybuns
Anyone else annoyed at how evernote web clips are completely busted on AMP
pages?

------
themaveness
I imagine it will likely be shelved soon either by lawsuit or just by Google's
closing it down.

~~~
akras14
I appreciate your optimism, but my read is that current Google management is
very heavily invested in this idea and will fight hard before they give it up.

In addition AMP has penetrated other platforms, like Facebook, Twitter and
Pinterest.

The cat is out of the bag, and it will not be easy to put it back.

~~~
sliverstorm
_The cat is out of the bag, and it will not be easy to put it back._

Yup, now that those damn users have gotten a taste of speed & low data usage,
it's gonna be hard to drag them back to how it used to be. We had a good thing
going, and they didn't know any better.

~~~
akras14
No one is advocating for users to have a bad experience and large downloads.

~~~
onion2k
The author of the article being discussed expressly states that AMP is bad
because it doesn't allow chat services or 3rd party integrations. Those are
two examples of things that often lead to a bad experience and large
downloads.

------
aritali
I cannot see AMP remaining viable in the long run. I think there is going to
be a lot of push back or non adoption because the walled garden is just a way
to track users and advertise to them better.

------
denisehilton
What do you say about blogs? I understand that AMP is harmful to e-commerce
based websites but what about blogs that are totally based on content and
Google ads? How does it impact them?

------
w00bl3ywook
wtf is this guy talking about? This article has so many errors, it should be
retracted.

------
ziggzagg
Mot google projects die organically, with a short life span. No need to keep
bashing AMP like this.

~~~
ashark
This particular AMP-bashing post just reminded me to go change mobile Safari's
default search engine to DDG, which I'd been meaning to do so I stop being
sent to terrible AMP pages, but kept forgetting to do because in the moment
I'm always more interested in finding the info I want on a non-AMP page than
fiddling with settings. So it was useful to me.

~~~
Lio
You can use Duck Duck Go to stop Google showing you AMP links in search
results by starting your searches with "!g".

If AMP was so good for me vs just good for Google I would expect them to allow
opt out for those, like me, that don't want to see AMP results.

------
kuschku
So, to avoid having to argue the same problems always again, here’s a summary
of some of the technical and antitrust issues with AMP:

1\. You have to embed the AMP version from Google’s servers, you can’t self-
host the AMP js, or run it from another CDN. This makes your site unavailable
in, for example, China, relies on Google’s systems, and ensures that Google
knows every user of your site.

Source: [https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/spec#required-
mark...](https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/spec#required-markup)

> contain a <script async
> src="[https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js"></script>](https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js"></script>)
> tag inside their head tag.

2\. You need to allow Google to cache the content, and all Google products
will always link to the Google cache version. You can not opt out of this. You
can not ensure users visit your own CDN version. You can not prevent Google
from displaying modified versions of the pages (for example, the header UI of
AMP pages in Google search, and the swiping between pages gesture).

Source:
[https://developers.google.com/amp/cache/faq](https://developers.google.com/amp/cache/faq)

> Q: Can I stop content from being cached?

> A: No. By using the AMP format, content producers are making the content in
> AMP files available to be cached by third parties. For example, Google
> products use the Google AMP Cache to serve AMP content as fast as possible.

3\. Pages that use AMP get a massive indirect ranking boost. Yes, they don’t
get directly boosted, but they get added to the AMP carousel, between the ads
and the #1 result, or between the #1 and #2 result. If, for a given search
term, none of the top pages have an AMP result, Google will boost the first
3-4 pages that have an AMP result to this place – even if they’d organically
rank on page 10 or later. In some situations, I’ve seen results from page 13
boosted to #1.

------
thinbeige
Tried today to find a way to let amp-img mimic CSS' background-size cover
paired with background-position. Not possible, so I need still to use CSS'
background-image without AMP's preloading feature.

This is one of the most used features in HTML/CSS to handle images, people are
complaining in the Github issues, others rewrite the whole Internet in AMP
with AMP components.

This is ridiculous, Google just wants to restrict other ad networks' JS and
recreates HTML/CSS/JS for no real reason.

