Hidden Secrets of the Amazon Shopping Cart | Hacker News Reader

Hidden Secrets of the Amazon Shopping Cart

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82 pointsmattmcknight17 comments

Great article...its really something people need to remember. You may want the PERFECT website, but all the "perfect" websites that you are comparing yourself to, have spent close to a decade progressing to the current status. So its better to launch early, even if it looks like crap, just to see what people say.

If "crappy design" is the only negative comment your site gets, you know you are on your way to big bucks. Because you can always update the design at a later time

That's the advantage of the sort of analysis in this article, though - testing ideas by looking at other web sites is almost like implementing them yourself and then evolving.

This article and comments came at a good time for me just now - I'm working on a cart thing and trying to answer some of the same questions. One area I'm worried about - patents. As if good UI and software development wasn't hard enough, the whole patent mess makes it much more complicated. Aside from technical limitations, from a legal standpoint what can I do and what can I not do? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-click

I once worked for a web analytics company. One of the very popular presentations was an overlay of the customer's page which showed counts and percentages for every link and button off the page. It was a simple visual that showed what was converting and what was not. You should try to collect this data even if you are not using an expensive service. It facilitates little optimization experiments.

I use Google Analytics on several sites. It's got the same view you're talking about. We like it a lot although there are other things I'd like to change about GA. Can anyone suggest alternative web/ecommerce analytics?

IIRC Coremetrics starts out at $2 - $3000 per month. Probably the same for Omniture. Web Trends is quite a bit cheaper.

Interesting - thanks. I have a friend who used to work at Coremetrics. I didn't realize it was so expensive. Maybe it wouldn't seem like so much if we weren't all seduced by the free Google stuff.

Look at Clicktracks if you are looking for an intermediatte price range.

If "crappy design" is the only negative comment your site gets, you know you are on your way to big bucks"

I get that quite a bit. Yay! then, I guess?

I think one of the points we don't want to overlook is that they have something I want. I remember being quite angry that I actually had to figure out their web site after one of their changes, but I wanted the damn books and they beat the competition on price so I stuck it out.

Wow! Great article. I still remember that first version of the Amazon website shown as part of a series of historical screen shots.

The author makes a great point about having an evidence-based culture.

Anybody has any experience, links or suggestions on how to implement that sort of testing?

I'm interested in things like how to put it in place, with which users, over what period of time, tools to analyze the results, etc.

The concept is extremely simple: let's compare how people react to different design/layout/copywriting and pick the best one. In practice, it seems that there is quite a lot to put in place to track things properly.

Is Google Analytics enough for this?

You can check out G Website Optimizer

A good friend on mine interned there. Let me pose something to HN that he posed to me: 90% of my job was to get users to consume more. Is that ok because we're offering a good (cheap, convenient) service or is it slimey?

It sounds like the basics of capitalism to me - I imagine most companies would like their users to consume more, no?

"Consume" has negative connotations. How about "transact"? Voluntary transactions are good, because if they were bad people wouldn't do them.

> Voluntary transactions are good, because if they were bad people wouldn't do them.

Why would this be true?

He's doing more than most of congress is to prevent a recession!

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