Amazon

Stupid search tricks.

http://www.amazon.com

Amazon.com is one of the great success stories of e-commerce. Without any previous brick-and-mortar operation, Amazon has established itself as one of the best-known brands on the Internet. As such, many people look to Amazon as a benchmark of online success. We agree that Amazon has done many things right, but it’s also worth seeing how Amazon could improve in e-commerce.

Ease-of-use is a matter of life and death for the company. Unlike Apple, Dell, and Barnes & Noble, Amazon depends solely on e-commerce for its survival. Amazon can’t offer a poorly designed website and depend on storefront sales to pick up the slack. The website is all it has.

Competition with Barnes & Noble makes ease-of-use even more important for Amazon. Neither brand has a strong distinguishing factor. Looking at the two brands as a casual consumer, consider what Amazon and Barnes & Noble offer:

the same books
at the same prices
with the same delivery times

Books online are commodities. With the product, price, and delivery the same, what must be the determining factor? Assume this test case: Joe, an online consumer, wants to buy a book. He is aware of both Amazon and Barnes & Noble. With one mouse click he can abandon one site for the other. With such similar choices, which will Joe choose?

The operative phrase is: "Joe wants to buy a book." Joe has a goal in mind, and he’ll do business with the site that serves him best in accomplishing that goal. Joe’s buying decision can be determined by a very simple rule: Joe will buy books from the site that makes it easiest for him to buy books. In other words, competition in online commodities comes down to ease-of-use. Not discussion boards, not personalization, not book reviews, not contests, not celebrity chats. Ease-of-use. Make it easy for customers to buy, and customers will buy. When selling commodities online, ease-of-use distinguishes one brand from another. With that in mind, we now examine how easy it is to buy books from Amazon.

The Amazon Home Page

“You never get a second chance to make a first impression.” It's a cliché, but it holds true on the Web, where buying decisions can be made in the first few seconds of a customer's experience on a site. Remember this:

The home page is a company's first, and most important, opportunity to serve the customer. Ease-of-use must start on the home page.

Amazon's home page is, at best, moderately easy to use. Figure 10 shows the first screenful of the Amazon home page. When most customers come to Amazon, they want two things:

Quick, clear feedback that they've arrived at Amazon
A quick, easy way to find the book they want

The current Amazon design could improve on both these counts.

The Amazon logo

The Amazon logo is too big. Too big in file size, too big in screen area, and too big in the message it tries to get across:

Welcome to
amazon.com™
Earth’s Biggest Bookstore
2.5 million titles. Savings up to 40%.

Does Amazon really expect consumers to read all that text? How does the text help consumers achieve their goal of buying books as quickly and easily as possible? Amazon should take a hint from companies such as Yahoo and Excite, which have simple, one-word logos. No marketing speak - just quick, clear branding with a one-word title. Customers want to find the books they want. Amazon should realize that the home page makes Amazon no money. Amazon makes money only when it gets customers off the home page and into the buying process. The home page should quickly send traffic into the buying process; the home page should not be the final destination. It’s ineffective, then, for the search form to be hidden on the right of the page, separated from the most prominent section, “What We’re Reading.” Speaking of which, why is Amazon selling T-shirts in the prime real estate directly underneath?

Amazon could make much more money by serving its customers better on the home page. Most Amazon customers would find a prominent search form more useful than news about the latest Iain Pears novel (all due respect to Iain Pears). The search form should move directly below the logo - even if the logo stays as bloated as it is.

The Search Results Page

To continue our Amazon test, we used the search form on the home page to search for one of our favorite business books, Selling the Dream, by Guy Kawasaki. We typed this into the search form:

selling the dream

and then we clicked the “Search” button. Figure 11 shows the results we got. Here’s what we observed in our search results:

Amazon carries only two books whose titles contain the phrase “selling the dream,” yet neither book appears in the first seven results.
Six of the first seven results do not contain the word “selling.”
Scanning the page quickly, we spotted the last result, which showed a version of Kawasaki’s book that is out of print. (Usability studies have shown that the last item in a list is more easily found than items in the middle.)
Our desired result, which should have been result No. 1 or No. 2, was hidden in the middle (No. 8 out of 14)!

With these results, customers might easily conclude that Amazon doesn’t carry an in–print version of Selling the Dream. Hello, Barnes & Noble.

Why search results are important

Most Web users are goal-directed. Shoppers especially come to a site with one goal: to buy. Unfortunately, many companies treat shoppers poorly by complexifying their home pages with needless content. Amazon has hardly done much better. Even the home page search form is not prominent enough.

But even if Amazon had placed the search form below the logo in the upper-left, we'd still be dissatisfied with our search experience. A search form by itself is not enough; good search results are essential. If a customer uses the search engine and gets poor results, the sale could be lost.

If customers can't find the book, they won't buy the book.

We think we know why Amazon's search engine didn't return Kawasaki's book as the first search result. The home page search is, by default, a keyword search - which is different from searching for a particular book title. The particular rules of keyword searches may have caused the other books to be listed higher. But the customer shouldn't have to know that. If a customer searches for “selling the dream,” Kawasaki's book should come up first, no questions asked! By giving us poor search results, Amazon made it hard for us to buy.

The Continue Your Order Page

After adding the Kawasaki book to our cart, and clicking to begin the checkout process, we arrived at the Continue Your Order page (see Figure 12). Despite having progressed through several Amazon pages, we hadn’t committed to the sale; we still had the option to leave for Barnes & Noble. As the customer begins the final stages of the buying process, Amazon must make it as easy as possible for the customer to close the sale. Amazon could improve here. The Continue Your Order page can be reduced to one question: On which server do you want to continue your order?

Secure
Standard

Better yet, don’t even mention the word “server” at all. State the question in terms that the average user understands. For example: “Would you like us to use extra security as you finalize your order?” After all, security - not servers - is the important idea for customers.

But instead of focusing the page on that one clear question, Amazon presents the customer with a lengthy block of text. The buying process is slowed considerably. To be exact, we noticed three problems on the Continue Your Order page.

The toolbar graphic at the top is unnecessary. The goal of this page should be to choose only a server - any other options or links merely distract the customer from that goal.
The Shopping Cart graphic is inappropriate, since the shopping cart is not mentioned anywhere else on the page. If there really must be a graphic at the top, make it have something to do with the focus of the page: choosing servers and continuing the order.
The choice of servers is hidden within the block of text. The goal of the page is a simple choice between two options, and should be designed accordingly.

What to Learn From Amazon

The home page is your only chance at a first impression.
Make search prominent.
Give the customer good search results, or don’t offer search at all.
If a page has a simple goal, design the page simply.
Don’t distract customers from the buying process with unnecessary links.
Make it easy for the customer to buy.

Amazon, Eight Months Later

Amazon made two notable improvements to its home page: the logo, no longer “Earth's biggest,” shrank considerably, and the search form moved to a prominent position at the top of the page.

The Continue Your Order page, which we had identified as being unnecessarily long, was also simplified. The screenshot below shows the new page in its entirety, clearly focusing on the server choice. Notice also that the shopping cart is no longer mentioned.

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