

Amazon’s Navigation Bar Is Revealing - dell9000
http://ryanspoon.com/blog/2011/06/13/amazons-navigation-bar-is-revealing/

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bradleyland
Amazon is the kind of company that spends a lot of resources understanding how
visitors use their site. I'd venture that Amazon knows exactly what product
categories are strong "browsers" and which are strong from an "inbound link"
or "search" perspective.

Browser - Customers come to amazon.com, click through to a category, and just
browse

Inbound link - Users are fed to a landing/product page by some other source
(like a shopping engine or app)

Search - Someone comes to amazon.com looking for a specific product an
immediately places a search

Understanding which categories are used by these different classes of user
allows you to re-focus your primary navigation to maximize efficiency for each
class.

"Browsers" need categorical navigation. Notice that the top three (non cloud
service) categories available for immediate browsing are all entertainment
related. These are categories with a significant requirement for discovery;
that is, visitors looking to discover new content.

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dkarl
I agree. I buy several items per month, and other than the Kindle store, I
never realized any of those seven top items were on the front page anywhere.
I'm as surprised to see them as anyone else even though I visited that page
yesterday, today, and probably several times last week.

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mithaler
I'm willing to put an educated guess as to the reasoning behind such a design
choice: Amazon has found through research that they possess sufficient
mindshare that their customers all know what they sell and how to reach it,
and they don't need to prod people in the right direction to help them find
books or movies or music. Instead, they can focus on building awareness of
their newer cloud offerings.

~~~
kevinburke
Stores put men's clothes on the upper floors and women's clothes near the
door. This is because men go shopping to "buy clothes", not to "browse", but
women can be lured into a store by an attractive display and nice racks of
clothes on the first level.

My guess is people buying books know what they want but there are a lot of
customers who could be tempted into buying Amazon's cloud services.

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6ren
Just skimming the terms for their cloud drive, they have the right to increase
the fees at any time, without notice, effective immediately; though it won't
affect your service during its term. However, the "term" of the free service
is not mentioned - I would expect it not to have a term.

If they are going to promote a free service, and then scare you with a
"binding contract" agreement (which indicates they are really serious about
it), they should at least go to the trouble to assure you that they won't
charge you for what they say is free.

They also don't guarantee security or privacy - that's fair enough, pretty
standard.

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movingahead
It is similar to Google pushing its own services like Maps and Music results
in Search. Also, Amazon may think that users looking for physical goods will
stop and get enticed to its now impressive collection of digital stores.

~~~
esrauch
I don't think that is a fair assessment; Google's core products are the links
that are on the top of the google.com landing page. Amazon's core product is
the sale of physical goods, they are just trying to stay on the leading edge
of things and get a foothold in digital goods while the getting is still good.

They know that being early to market is insanely important today, even a year
delay can end up being the difference between Groupon and Google Deals. It's
typically impossible to compete with an entrenched product by one of the big
tech corps as they have the engineering man power to duplicate any improvement
you make over their formula if you start depriving them of the tiniest portion
of their user base.

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darrenkopp
Who uses the navigation bar? Who wades through categories? All I use is the
search bar, and that hasn't changed in years (except for the addition of
automatic suggestions).

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teach
Maybe I'm anomalous, but I use the navigation bar EVERY DAY, because I check
to see the free Android app and also check their discounted mp3 album and free
mp3. Each one is one click away using the navbar.

I prefer physical albums to mp3s, but if I can get a Grammy-award-winning
album for $5, I'll live with mp3s.

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bretthellman
Likely not a problem as most users search as a starting point. Would be
interesting to see the data...

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thought_alarm
They seem to be using "Appstore" as a proper name.

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alimbada
Not the same on the UK site.

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saraid216
Amazon: Who needs a keynote?

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spiralganglion
This seems somewhat tasteless. Surely there's a better way they could push
their services on their physical-goods customers.

If this is a response to iCloud, it's not a very "Apple-like" response. Then
again, Amazon's cloud offerings aren't very "Apple-like" either, for better or
for worse.

~~~
ghurlman
It's hardly a response... it's been that way for a while.

