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Comment by neffy | Hacker News Reader

The website hasn´t changed and notably hasn´t improved in over a decade.

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.

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I don't want Amazon's website to change. It works well as it is, I certainly never find myself wanting something it doesn't currently do.

> It works well as it is

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.

You just articulated basically every complaint I have about buying anything from Amazon. It seems unarguably true that I can’t buy anything from them if I can’t find it. So, why is it so hard to search for anything I don’t already know the exact name of?

> It seems unarguably true that I can’t buy anything from them if I can’t find it.

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.

So much of the result of a search is now explicitly advertising. Amazon now has a new incentive to sell ads and display those ads as often as possible, whereas before their only goal was to return relevant results to the customer making the search.

You can say the same about Google search, yet their organic results are still quite relevant. Isn’t Amazon supposed to be focusing on the customer?

That hasn't been my experience at all, but the further point is that is all background stuff. They can improve the search without changing the UI, so it's not really a response to my point.

It's very much a response to your point. From your original post:

> 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.

this is such a classless reply.

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 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.

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.

and this is how you get dismissed.

"Broken" is one-dimensional-black-and-white-thinking-speak for "works for most, most of the time, but has some behavior I don't like so it's 100% useless."

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.

> "Broken" is one-dimensional-black-and-white-thinking-speak for "works for most, most of the time, but has some behavior I don't like so it's 100% useless."

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.

Problems with Amazon's website:

- 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.

Google's website hasn't changed either, and neither has HN. And that's a good thing. Nothing drives customers away faster than change for change's sake and constant pointless redesigns.

Except the search page has changed, just well.

Within the last few years they moved the footer to stick to the bottom of the page and made the buttons flatter.

https://web.archive.org/web/*/google.com

Google does this constantly with Gmail, calendar, Android, and so on.

Google’s homepage has changed but very slightly. For instance voice input options, removing ‘I’m feeling lucky’ and the addition of profiles/account info. But it’s a pretty minimalist page, and big redesign is usually a bad idea since they are liable to piss off your most loyal and dedicated customers/users/subscribers.

I think Amazon as a store is probably being deprioritized in favor of Amazon as a giant e-commerce facilitator that handles all the payment processing and backend logistics.

The consequence has been ruining the storefront experience, but that’s not really what they care about anymore.

That’s because Amazon knows retail is already dead. Either they get beat out by a competitor or the fed breaks up the company and retail is doomed without the integration. AWS is just quietly milking the cash out of retail and funding the science projects.

This is a preposterous statement.

"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?

Retail is far from dead with just about every retailer reporting record sales and consumer confidence remaining high. Amazon has plenty marketshare to take, whether as a monolithic organization or several independent companies.

Retail as a business is fine.

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.

Downsizing back to books? That goes against every available metric.

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.

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