Where did my orders on Amazon go?

Why does Amazon.com succeed with such poor UX design?

• Forgive me if this sounds like a rant, but I’ll try to keep my criticisms concise. Generally speaking, I believe that Amazon’s website is somewhat difficult to navigate, and shipping prices are buried in the checkout process.  Shipping is also not explained as clearly as it should be.  I do agree that their search feature is great and I love being able to find everything I’m looking for on one website. There are just a few things that have recently caused me to give pause.  Mainly, I’m always left with a bad taste in my mouth after purchasing through Amazon.  Let me explain: I believe that there are general goals an e-commerce website needs to have.  The site needs to convert customers and add more value to the shopping experience than the competitors. Goal 1 - Value: Bring value to your customers.  This may be through extra content and features, better customer service, better prices, better information, etc. Amazon’s product pages are a huge splatter of information.  I constantly find myself hunting for the details about the product I’m looking for.  Scrolling a little doesn’t bother me; having to use my browser’s search box to find data on every page does. Also, finding the shopping cart and checkout buttons should be much easier than it is.  The site is just so busy, it’s often visually overwhelming (especially to new customers). Goal 2 - Conversion: Get your customers from the information gathering stage to the checkout process.  Once you click the checkout button on http://Amazon.com, you are navigationally locked into the process.  There is no clear cut way to go back to the previous page.  I often see “reload previous request” messages when using my browser’s back button.  I instead click the Amazon logo to abort a checkout process and start over.  Why do I start over?  Because I had to go all the way to the final step of the checkout process before seeing the shipping costs.  I often find myself keying in my address when trying to get my items to correctly qualify for “super saver” shipping, and then going back to adjust the items and quantities. The shipping page is a nightmare when you are ordering several products.  There are often multiple sellers and shipments, and trying to figure out how to qualify for ”super saver” shipping or other special deals is almost rocket science on big orders.  Promotional codes will tell you that your order does not qualify, but they do not tell you why.  So, now I have to go back to my cart and figure out what I did wrong.  I just want my coupon to work. At this point I realize that I’ve added 10 things to my cart in order to get free shipping on the original two items I wanted.  This up-sell technique is a great tool for Amazon to increase sales, but it drives me nuts as a customer. I’ve built e-commerce websites for many clients, and I do not claim to be the best at it, but a company as big as Amazon should be getting some of these finer details right.  Conversion is definitely huge to the success of an online store, but I feel that http://Amazon.com has placed its conversion goal above delivering the best customer experience. I’ve emptied my cart in my past few shopping sessions and purchased from other websites due to frustrations with complicated promo codes, multi-seller/shipping, and just plain information gathering.

• Answer:

  This question makes a false assumption. What is it about Amazon's design that is horribly bad? One of the biggest ways people use Amazon is search results and they do their best to make sure those visits result in sales.