Amazon is VERY far from the stagnation that happened at Microsoft in the Ballmer era. In fact I'd say they are moving faster than ever. Why would you say they need a "turnaround"?
The customer feedback has gone from being the reference for buying products to only being able to trust the 1 star reviews.
It´s flooded with stuff relayed from China, and consequently its cheaper to just buy direct from China.
Here in the UK we have creepy corporate amazon stakhanovite "we just love pushing these parcels" ads to endure all christmas. Apparently one of the workers brings in cakes for her colleagues every Tuesday - oh, Amazon, the company that can´t even put food for its underpaid and overworked employees in the company break rooms.
What a wonderful world.
Within the last few years they moved the footer to stick to the bottom of the page and made the buttons flatter.
"Retail is already dead?"
By what metric. Please enlighten us how people buying things is not a massive lever to the economy and Amazon's success?
Amazon's retail may be slowly dying, overcome with fakes, razor-thin margins, dwindling faith of buyers, and a looming anti-trust investigation. The retail department is at some risk of downsizing back to mostly books.
It would be wise for them to concentrate on stuff that goes well: AWS, Alexa.
Amazon retail is growing like crazy. They have more retail channels opening up beyond the main ecommerce store and they're investing 1.5B for 1-day delivery (while trivially putting Fedex on death watch as a side effect). The only serious competition they have is Walmart which has hit on groceries as a magic bullet, and Target.
Fakes are not as big of a problem as HN makes it seem. Margins only help Amazon beat its competitors. And there's nothing antitrust can do since there's no monopoly on retail outlets, people want to shop there by choice.
Search is horribly broken, sorting is broken, ratings are broken, products are broken up into categories that don't make sense and searching and sorting between categories is broken.
Most people are looking for the best value they can get at the lowest price they can find. Amazon's site makes that process difficult and nearly impossible. I can only speculate as to why that is.
> It works well as it is, I certainly never find myself wanting something it doesn't currently do.
You are talking about functionality, and I am responding about Amazon's functionality.
You don't get to tell me what my point was and you certainly don't get to argue with me about what my point is.
The person I responded to said the website hasn't changed. I read that as a redesign of the site itself.
Now, there's nothing wrong if you read it differently. Where you stepped over the line is when you decided to argue with me about what my point is.
You said one thing, which I replied to, and now you're claiming it's another thing. I'm not really sure what you expect when you do that.
So you can't perfectly compare an item that is cross-listed in multiple categories. Is that "broken", or not ideal?
Even ratings, the worst thing about amazon, are "useful" in that you can instantly look at the distribution. All 5's and 1's? Product sucks.
Please do not strawman my position just because you disagree with it. Sorting by price doesn't sort by price, sorting by average customer review doesn't sort by average customer review and so on.
> So you can't perfectly compare an item that is cross-listed in multiple categories. Is that "broken", or not ideal?
When the feature says "sort by price" and it doesn't sort by price, it is broken. I assume you work in software development, so you should know this.
> Even ratings, the worst thing about amazon, are "useful" in that you can instantly look at the distribution. All 5's and 1's? Product sucks.
This isn't even remotely true. I've come across hundreds of listings that have reviews for products that are clearly not the product in the listing. The fact that this is even allowed means that the rating system is broken.
- For a long time they performed poorly on Firefox. Opening multiple tabs would cause my PC to come to a crawl. They fixed this 1-2 years ago.
- I used to be able to jump directly to reviews. Now it's multiple clicks away. One click to get to the review section. Then scroll down. Then click again. This is very annoying.
- I don't get notified when someone replies to my review. The rest of the world solved this problem well over 15 years ago.
- Lumping of quite different products into one listing, so when I'm reading reviews I can't easily tell if I'm reading the review for the product I want.
- Way too many gamed reviews out there. Whole web sites exist to handle this problem that Amazon has.
- Same item has multiple listings. Why?
I could list all the other problems that their retail division has, but the above is just about the web site. Whenever I hear that they are Customer Obsessed, I wonder which world they live in. As someone who buys stuff from them, and as someone who has sold stuff through them, neither experience could be classified as caring much for the customer.
Their retail division really does remind me of MS Windows and its stagnation, where MS wouldn't improve anything because of their dominance.
The consequence has been ruining the storefront experience, but that’s not really what they care about anymore.