Amazon - have they lost their touch?
Amazon used to be one of the text book examples of usability in e-commerce. Famously, “Don’t Make Me Think”, an excellent introduction to user centred design by Steve Krug, includes a chapter called “If you love Amazon so much, why don’t you marry it?”
Recently, I was given an Amazon gift voucher, and I’ve been using the site a fair bit as a result. I’m afraid the experience hasn’t been very good.
Firstly, the Amazon stock and the market place are mingled in the most confusing ways. I can only use my voucher on Amazon stock, and the fact that I’m going to have to pay cash for something isn’t made clear until very late in the checkout process. In fact, it isn’t really made clear in the late stages: I had to look very closely to see what happened, and in one case had to cancel a market place purchase after I realised they hadn’t used the voucher.
Secondly, tracking missed packages has become incredibly hard. You’d think clicking the “where’s my stuff” link in your account would help, but you have to go so much deeper than that, and the navigation is impossibly unclear. I felt like I was testing the site for them, and in fact the tracking didn’t work when I did find it.
Generally the whole site feels a lot more complex and clunky than it used to.
What did work well was the tool that sets up calls to their call centre, facilitated by estara (owned by ATG, who compete with Amazon in some regards).
When you compare amazon.co.uk with Amazon’s excellent Endless shoe site (still actually a beta) you can see what they are capable of, so why is the main UK site so poor?
It seems my blogging helped: my missing package arrived today.