
Hidden Secrets of the Amazon Shopping Cart  - peter123
http://www.grokdotcom.com/2008/02/26/amazon-shopping-cart/
======
dschoon
I have great admiration for the amount of time and precision put into this
article--as well as Amazon's relentless, cold, uncool devotion to
optimization.

These meditations on A/B optimization reminded me of a genetic algorithm-based
A/B testing framework mentioned not too long ago:
<http://ejohn.org/blog/genetic-ab-testing-with-javascript/> (I'd link to
Genetify itself, but there's no homepage, just the demo)

An interesting thought: Why hasn't this caught on? Machines are good at
exactly the things A/B testing aims at: measuring performance, permuting a
test-matrix, and reporting on the results. This is not to say Genetify is the
answer, but rather that I rarely hear of conversion optimization from
developers.

~~~
paraschopra
Part of the reason why developers don't really focus in conversion
optimization is that it requires continuous creative effort. It is not
something like you do once and then be happy with it. Coming up with different
variations which can perform well is hard and doing it consistently is even
harder.

Another reason is that proper optimization requires a good amount of traffic,
without which your A/B tests would never achieve statistical significance.

That said, optimization is pretty popular with online retailers and big web
companies from whom even a 0.1% change in conversions/signups/etc can result
into addition of tens of thousands, or even millions of dollars of revenues.
For small-websites, the benefit of 0.1% may not be obvious. Hence, not much
motivation for investing in optimization.

------
wave
Duplicate post. See <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=434830>

------
dlevine
Amazon supposedly has an amazing experiments system. Someone can launch an
experimental feature, and if it succeeds, it gradually becomes the default.

Having your users vote is definitely the best way to make decisions. Lately,
when my cofounder and I disagree, I say "let's build both versions and ask our
users which one they like best." (in most cases, the differences are trivial
enough to make this feasible).

------
xel02
First lesson: A great e-commerce website needs to evolve, and that evolving
should be done through thorough testing and optimization.

Second Lesson (one I feel is more important in general): Don’t copy what other
people do if you aren’t fully aware of the business issues involved.

------
alanthonyc
Great analysis of Amazon's evolution of their call to action. One thing that
struck me the most while reading it though was:

"Back then, ... Amazon, for the most part, sold books."

I just consider them a generic shopping mall now.

~~~
frossie
I expect this is why the quantity is more up-front now. I bet it is pretty
unusual for anybody to buy multiple copies of a given book at once, so
defaulting to one and giving the opportunity to adjust later made sense. Now
that they sell many things that are probably bought in multiple quantities
(say, socks), customers are probably having to adjust the quantities more
often.

All very well, but sometimes I wish they would spend a bit more time on their
wishlists - not much has changed since the beginning and some more effort in
this area is overdue by now.

