Amazon: screw the simplicity, stick to what sells

I was reading a presentation by Ronny Kohavi and Matt Round from Amazon.com on Amazon using analytics for deciding on what the site looks like, what the top-level navigation looks like, and what the front page of Amazon.com looks like. Hat tip to Greg Linden for linking to it.

Amazon has been widely known for throwing a gauntlet to all the widely accepted Web 2.0 maxims. Standards support? Nah. Using simple URLs? Event front page directs to something like http://www.amazon.com/ref=topnav_gw_gw/104-6121055-7037564, although, granted, it doesn’t have the obidos links with a bunch of hyphenated nouns that it used to.

What’s interesting in that set of slide is defying another maxim – simple is beautiful. Granted, the implementation of simple might differ depending on what function you’re trying to accomplish. There are two slides discussing experimenting with Amazon front page in order to make it simpler.Amazon simple page 1 So why is the front page of Amazon such a hodge-podge of suggestions, recommendations, related items, new additions, shakers and movers and other recently viewed items? The answer is simple – it sells better.

Amazon simple page 2Simple design in Amazon’s case generated higher cart abandonment and statistically significant decreases in customer conversions. Which is all that matters in data-driven e-commerce company. So it looks like in Amazon’s case its customer not only do not do not appreciate simplicity thrown upon them, they actually enjoy and celebrate complexity, partying with their dollars when the front page is complex.

Posted Monday, February 19th, 2007 under Money, Programming, Technology.
  • http://stratojet.org vinayd

    a hodge-podge of suggestions, recommendations, related items, new additions, shakers and movers and other recently viewed items

    I don’t think it’s just the complex jumble that makes the difference. there are plenty of sites that go beyond the pale cramming whatever they can ‘above the fold’. the industry is full of brochurists.

    amazon succeeds because they *have* suggestions; they have userful data for their users to interpret. tying behvavior to unique users is the killer app, not (only) the jam-packed pages.

  • Ken

    PDF is created April 2004 which means the data is likely 3 years old.

  • http://www.webologist.co.uk Webologist

    Probably if more sites worked as hard as Amazon do to improve their sites performance, then more sites may look more like Amazon and less minimal. Another example is the BBC News site. It is crammed with news links etc. and is probably a better site for it.

    Minimal sites rely a lot on excellent navigation, and the user already knowing what they are looking for. If your site provides new information or new products, you need to do the hard sell to get people interested.

    Having many visitors must be a great help in improving a site too. With thousands of visits a day it would be very easy to test and optismise a site for best performance.

  • http://www.blog.lgr.ca LGR

    This does not surprise me. Look at Ebay, while the home page is not as busy, the search pages and finding anything is a total mess. It is almost painful to look at, yet they get more users and sell more all the time. I disagree that Amazon succeeds because the have suggestions. That might help but it is not the whole story. They succeed, for the same reason Ebay does….branding and marketing.

  • tk

    Another case of massive oversimplification that gets picked up and spread around the blogosphere without any critical thinking. Amazon has invested HOW many millions of dollars on usability and design, just to have a bunch of pundits boil it down to “complexity=good, simplicity=bad”.

    No, no, NO!

    Good complexity=good (Amazon), good simplicity=good (Google)
    Bad complexity=bad, bad simplicity=bad (endless examples of both)

    Giving people what they want will always lead to better sales, as will working really hard on finding out the best way to give it to them. ‘Nuff said.