Why is Amazon.com such a crappy website? | Hacker News Reader

Why is Amazon.com such a crappy website?

1 pointmarshmallow_127 comments

The title speaks for itself. The website interface is bulky and dense, the buttons and graphics look like they haven't been changed since the late noughties and there are the actual search results. whatever you search for on Amazon, you will always be presented with dozens of random items, some with the most tenuous links to your object of search and others that are completely random. All pages of results are littered with far too many sponsored items.

But it gets worse, the more specific you make your searches, the more irrelevant the results will be.

Contrast that with Ebay. a beautifully clean format, fast results, easy filtering, and the results actually correspond with what you were searching for. The exact opposite of Amazon. (i'm not advertising, just describing my own experiences)

This begs the question: Amazon is one of the biggest company in the world. Their success is largely based on their domain. Why then, is said site so -for lack of better pejorative- crappy? and why is this tolerated by the masses?

Interesting thought. It seems a lot of successful websites are, or can be thought of as crappy. Look at South Korean naver.com or craigslist among many others.

I've seen reports that its due to user familiarity, and I've actually worked at one place where we measured conversion rate before and after a redesign and the CVR fell after the redesign but we stuck with it despite the data saying otherwise.

I think many people don't want to mess with success.

I think “crappy” is the wrong word. You mean not aesthetically pleasing to you.

Could it be that a lot of UX/UI best practices are so much b.s. based on preference and fad rather than testing? Clearly Amazon has a successful site, so one could deduce that users don’t actually care about appearances as long as they can find and buy stuff.

Costco puts very little effort into appearances but I don’t let that stop me shopping there.

Quite likely a local optimum from the fact they a/b test everything incrementally all to heck. A major shift inherently will end up worse in the short term even if it is better in the long term.

It's hard to do a major change both from the perspective of end user comfort and the fact it will need to be improved to deal with unforeseen issues.

The response (rumor?) I’ve consistently heard is that Amazon relentlessly tests and optimized the layout of the website towards sales - and not visual attractiveness.

but the website is outrageously slow.

Pure speculation, but:

Things suck by default. You have to make them better. So websites especially at the scale of Amazon aren’t automatically fast. Work (i.e. $$$) has to be dedicated to it.

Continuing with the hypothesis that Amazon ruthlessly “optimizes” for a specific goal (not necessarily “optimizes” their code,) the conclusion would be that Amazon found that a faster website does not in fact lead to more sales.

Or it did lead to more sales, but not enough to justify the cost of making the website faster.

I agree with searching the more specific you search the less accurate results you get

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