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Comment by mkramlich | Hacker News Reader

Amazon has one of the most cluttered web UI's I've seen and yet they succeed because they deliver something real that people want: you can buy stuff there and they mail it to you, and the web functionality at least allows you to do that. Ugly and busy as heck UI though.

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Maybe I'm in the minority, but I've been impressed with Amazon. What eCommerce sites are doing a better job? If you are looking at the US you have Amazon, eBay, Walmart, and Target (based on Quantcast traffic). Throw in Overstock and a handful of others, but Amazon still seems to be way ahead of everyone else.

I'm also impressed with Amazon. They kick ass. They innovate. They execute. They provide something that people actually want. Etc. The only thing I don't really like is that their website design is very cluttered, like cognitive vomit, very distracting. I'd love to see a more simplified, use case-oriented UI wrapper around what they do. Make all the side noise go away.

Amazon succeeds in a similar way to Godaddy and low cost airline sites do - because people go there with the prior intention of buying something and the cluttered interface full of recommendations is more likely to convince them to add to that than put them off. The same doesn't apply to lesser stores that might scare away much of their "just browsing" traffic trying to do the same thing.

Couldn't agree more. I think Amazon really had tried to design based on the user experience at the center and not colors/how it looks/cool AJAX etc. A lot of times you see a big letter from Bezos on the homepage and I think its brilliant. Amazon is basically what every ecommerce should to copy - because they have figured out what works.

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