Amazon’s Navigation Bar Is Revealing

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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

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

Not the same on the UK site.

Amazon: Who needs a keynote?

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.