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What If Amazon.com Actually Is a Horrible Website?

137 points by smacktoward 8y ago

CognitiveLens 8y ago
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 8y ago
  The rumor was bezos had to sign off on every pixel. Not sure if that's still true?
  - camtarn 8y ago
    Never was when I was there (2010-2013), and I wrote widgets that deployed on the global website home page.
  - cheeze 8y ago
    0 chance
- mavsman 8y ago
  > What if BuzzFeedNews.com is actually... trolling its audience? Couldn't agree more. Buzzfeed always makes me cringe. Even when an article sounds genuinely interesting and less click baity, I can't bring myself to visit the site.
  - smt88 8y ago
    Buzzfeed and Buzzfeed News are completely different products with different quality levels and goals
stock_toaster 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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).
  - vinay427 8y ago
    The only time I've had to think about how to do something on the Amazon marketplace website is when trying to contact their support. I'm required to go through several prompts asking if one of their FAQs answers my questions, and of course they don't, though perhaps this is intentional to make their support more efficient. 95% of the time, everything works as I expect it to, which is about as good as it gets for me.
  - ajhurliman 8y ago
    Any particular gripes with AWS? Genuinely curious, not defending anything here.
    - avinium 8y ago
      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.
  - preommr 8y ago
gtirloni 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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.
- 8y ago
Exuma 8y ago
This is cringeworthy and stupid af.
will_pseudonym 8y ago
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.
chadcmulligan 8y ago
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 8y ago
  Is "customers who viewed this also viewed..." not good enough for you?
  - thaumasiotes 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      > 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 8y ago
        I am being recommended books by the same author.
  - 8y ago
dwighttk 8y ago
It is the worst website that can successfully sell a lot of things to a lot of people.
- withhighprod 8y ago
  Most of it is still written in java/ruby (or somehow rendered). it’s sooo hard to change for some reason. Guess there are enough backward compatibility issue with elder customers(yes amazon still thinks mid age customers as their major customer)
ldarby 8y ago
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 8y ago
  ublock and dark reader.
ergothus 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      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
      - 8y ago
MisterTea 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
plandis 8y ago
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 8y ago
  Lots of things can bump short term revenues in an A/B test, but leave long term unhappiness.
victor106 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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
fingerprinter 8y ago
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.
- kanox 8y ago
  > And DX doesn't matter to most developers? I'm a developer and don't know what that is.
  - pandapower2 8y ago
    Presumably developer experience, the developers experience working with a particular project, tool or whatever. Sometimes referred to as "dev x".
  - r00fus 8y ago
    Developer UX.
jackvalentine 8y ago
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 8y ago
  Yeah, likewise, the lack of arrival date filtering is pretty annoying.
kevindong 8y ago
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 8y ago
  reddit's mobile site makes me actively want to not use reddit. it's enraging
alistproducer2 8y ago
My biggest complaint with Amazon is the site is slow even on my powerful desktop.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
brownbat 8y ago
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.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/15/business/retail-industry.... 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.
midnightdiesel 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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.
jammygit 8y ago
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)
monochromatic 8y ago
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.
bastawhiz 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
- puranjay 8y ago
  I'm just doing less online shopping in general. I realize I buy less crap and end up spending on better quality products if I go in store.
partiallypro 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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.
crooked-v 8y ago
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 8y ago
  Sadly enough, I’ve bought four Roku TVs from Amazon. Three forcour house and one for my dad.
  - unwiredben 8y ago
    Thanks! (actual Roku TV software engineer)
    - scarface74 8y ago
      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.
Flozzin 8y ago
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.
agentofoblivion 8y ago
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.
sxp62000 8y ago
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?
CM30 8y ago
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.
NightlyDev 8y ago
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 8y ago
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.
thrower123 8y ago
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.
astura 8y ago
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 8y ago
  >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.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
rdl 8y ago
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.
mikelward 8y ago
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.

137 points by smacktoward 8y ago

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 8y ago
The rumor was bezos had to sign off on every pixel. Not sure if that's still true?
- camtarn 8y ago
  Never was when I was there (2010-2013), and I wrote widgets that deployed on the global website home page.
- cheeze 8y ago
  0 chance
mavsman 8y ago
> What if BuzzFeedNews.com is actually... trolling its audience? Couldn't agree more. Buzzfeed always makes me cringe. Even when an article sounds genuinely interesting and less click baity, I can't bring myself to visit the site.
- smt88 8y ago
  Buzzfeed and Buzzfeed News are completely different products with different quality levels and goals

stock_toaster 8y ago

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 8y ago
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).
- vinay427 8y ago
  The only time I've had to think about how to do something on the Amazon marketplace website is when trying to contact their support. I'm required to go through several prompts asking if one of their FAQs answers my questions, and of course they don't, though perhaps this is intentional to make their support more efficient. 95% of the time, everything works as I expect it to, which is about as good as it gets for me.
- ajhurliman 8y ago
  Any particular gripes with AWS? Genuinely curious, not defending anything here.
  - avinium 8y ago
    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.
- preommr 8y ago

gtirloni 8y ago

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 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
8y ago

Exuma 8y ago

This is cringeworthy and stupid af.

will_pseudonym 8y ago

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.

chadcmulligan 8y ago

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 8y ago
Is "customers who viewed this also viewed..." not good enough for you?
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    > 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 8y ago
      I am being recommended books by the same author.
- 8y ago

dwighttk 8y ago

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

withhighprod 8y ago
Most of it is still written in java/ruby (or somehow rendered). it’s sooo hard to change for some reason. Guess there are enough backward compatibility issue with elder customers(yes amazon still thinks mid age customers as their major customer)

ldarby 8y ago

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 8y ago
ublock and dark reader.

ergothus 8y ago

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 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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
    - 8y ago

MisterTea 8y ago

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 8y ago
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.

plandis 8y ago

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 8y ago
Lots of things can bump short term revenues in an A/B test, but leave long term unhappiness.

victor106 8y ago

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 8y ago
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

fingerprinter 8y ago

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.

kanox 8y ago
> And DX doesn't matter to most developers? I'm a developer and don't know what that is.
- pandapower2 8y ago
  Presumably developer experience, the developers experience working with a particular project, tool or whatever. Sometimes referred to as "dev x".
- r00fus 8y ago
  Developer UX.

jackvalentine 8y ago

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 8y ago
Yeah, likewise, the lack of arrival date filtering is pretty annoying.

kevindong 8y ago

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 8y ago
reddit's mobile site makes me actively want to not use reddit. it's enraging

alistproducer2 8y ago

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

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

brownbat 8y ago

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.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/15/business/retail-industry.... 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.

midnightdiesel 8y ago

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 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.

jammygit 8y ago

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)

monochromatic 8y ago

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.

bastawhiz 8y ago

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 8y ago
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.
puranjay 8y ago
I'm just doing less online shopping in general. I realize I buy less crap and end up spending on better quality products if I go in store.

partiallypro 8y ago

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 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.

crooked-v 8y ago

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 8y ago
Sadly enough, I’ve bought four Roku TVs from Amazon. Three forcour house and one for my dad.
- unwiredben 8y ago
  Thanks! (actual Roku TV software engineer)
  - scarface74 8y ago
    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.

Flozzin 8y ago

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.

agentofoblivion 8y ago

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.

sxp62000 8y ago

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?

CM30 8y ago

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.

NightlyDev 8y ago

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 8y ago

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.

thrower123 8y ago

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.

astura 8y ago

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 8y ago
>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.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

rdl 8y ago

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.

mikelward 8y ago

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.