Although the Amazon UI has had a reasonably good overhaul, its been pretty much cosmetic. I like the fact that they have more intuitive dropdowns, a large cart icon and a navigation panel on the left. Sadly the number of clicks I require to accomplish a few tasks and few of the under-performing features leave much to my imagination.

I think Amazon has done an amazing job in terms of site uptime, customer service and on-time delivery/handling of orders. A few changes would go a long way!

So here’s my ramblings on a few:

Search
- Make everything searchable. I mean EVERYTHING! Make all past items (for the last 5 years in my case) I have purchased on Amazon searchable. Its a big big pain trying to find that one thing I had ordered once and I want one more of it or want to gift to my friend. Make it easy and straightforward.

- Make my wish list searchable. How am I supposed to manage/find items in the 200+ items in my wish list (or shopping list or any list for that matter).

- In addition to the above, if I search for a keyword that matches against things I have bought in the past and/or have in my wish/shopping lists then why not show them in small boxes on the sides on the search results page?

- Please make search fast! Always helpful. Since right now I happen to be using Google to search amazon. Looking for that Objective-C book on Amazon. My search is “Amazon objective-c” and off I go! Also, how about auto-complete as soon as I start typing anything. Maybe the name of a book or author or product etc.?

Shopping Cart
- Why does deleting an item require a page refresh (AJAX anyone?)? Moreover why do I have to go one by one on each item to delete them? How about a “delete all” button with a warning popup? I know they all sound like revenue losing propositions, but offer an awesome customer experience. Believe me, if I don’t want to purchase something then a bad delete implementation is not going to make me!

- I as a regular user of Amazon am always shopping or looking for a few things. Gifts, something for the house, books, what have you. I may or not buy them at the same time and hence am forced to use the “save for later feature”. Moreover lets say I am trying to buy a few small things for my parents anniversary. Why can’t I make a separate cart for them which once filled with the items I so desire, can be purchased with 1 click? Basically I should be able to create custom carts on the fly.

Lists
- Although a few changes have been made in lists they are still not manageable. Apart from the fact that I can’t search them, there is no capability to subscribe to or get updated when things get added to my friends wish lists. There is no easy way to share my wish list on my blog (as a widget) or on Facebook etc. If fixed I think lists can be a big winner and revenue driver for Amazon

- If I visit a product which is already in my wish list, instead of informing me of that fact, Amazon keeps showing me the “Add to Wishlist” button. Would be really cool if Amazon fixed that and went a few steps ahead. How about knowing who my friends are (social network here we come!!) and showing me which of my friends have that item on their public lists.

Account/Orders
- Usually when I’ve placed a few orders on Amazon and they have been shipped I sometimes come to Amazon to track those orders. This tracking requires me to make 3 clicks before I even land on the page where my orders are:

Account (click) -> Recent Orders:Go (click) -> Username/password (click)

Why can’t there be an easier way to track orders? Moreover the estimates for delivery and shipping that Amazon gives (at least to non-Amazon Prime members) are way off most of the times. How about send me an email (or SMS) when the product gets delivered? UPS/DHL provide that state in their API’s, so it shouldn’t be that difficult to implement. To improve the above 3-click process I can propose:

Account_Dropdown:Recent Orders (click) -> Username/password (click)

OR

If I’ve logged in within the last 30 minutes then just skip the Username/password step and reduce the entire process to 1-click!

I noticed that amazon was putting “soldbyamazon” keyword in many of my searches. Turns out its a feature I had discussed with a friend of mine working at Amazon!

What it helps you do is find products sold by amazon ONLY, hence filtering out the merchants. The merchants do offer a lot of variety, but some great amazon deals get lost in the crowd. Merchants charge exorbitant shipping fee also, whereas amazon ships most of the stuff for free.

So go ahead and search “showonlyamazon mountain bike” on amazon and feel the difference!

On the face of it Yahoo’s new offering Y! Answers might seem “similar” to Google answers or other similar services that may exist out there, but its a refreshingly different offering. Anyone can ask any question. Unlike Google Answers though:

1. Anyone can answer any question, unlike a limited set of vetted “answerers”.
2. You don’t have to pay to get your questions answered.
3. You or the community decides the best answer after a certain period of time.

The nice (and evolving) scoring system that has been put in place makes it a very fun process too! Two common questions that people have asked me are:

1. Why not simply search online for your question?
2. What’s the incentive for people to spend time and answer questions?

The answer to the former is simple. Search engines are not good yet to answer questions like this (I had friends visiting me over Christmas!):

I got 3 good answers to my question in less than 10 minutes!

The answer to the latter is a combination of addiction, competition (increasing your score) and monetization. If you go to Y! answers and click on your name on the top next to your score then you are taken to a page that lists your score details, past asked/answered questions etc. At the bottom you will see this (Disclaimer: I work on the YPN team):

Its not clear yet how Y! plans to reward publishers. But advertising next to search results has already been put into place:

This brings me to my final point: “Why Amazon.com should care?”. The reason Amazon should care is:

• People will soon start asking questions as to why Amazon does not reward its customers who post comments / product reviews on its website. Its anyone’s guess that these reviews help Amazon in a big way. Why not say a Thank You by giving reviewers discounts or gift card $$ ??
• Product reviews are usually never comprehensive. Why not put a simple Q&A feature in place where people can ask simple product questions and get them answered. They could show the recently asked or answered questions on the home-page etc.

Is the average online shopper loyal? Would he still pay 5% more on Amazon than buying the same product from a not so well known online seller? I say it depends on what a person is buying.

If its a $3k plasma television then sure go ahead and buy from Amazon (given that they give a 30 day price guarantee (more on that later) and their electronics prices are very competitive… after rebates mostly). But what if its a $30-50 book or some similar product whose price doesn’t fluctuate as much as electronics? I don’t see why I should be loyal to any online seller when buying such a product. This is in contrast to an old essay by Joel Spolsky on Ben and Jerry’s vs. Amazon, where he talks about network effects and customer lock-in.

All this came to my mind when I was on a book buying spree this week. I bought 4 books and none of them from Amazon! Froogle searches led me to these two great sites: superbookdeals and bookpool. Below is the money I saved on each book (including shipping costs etc.):

1. The Art of Product Management — Scott Berkum ** Money Saved = $7
2. Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X — Aaron Hillegass ** Money Saved = $7.05
3. Java Puzzlers: Traps, Pitfalls, and Corner Cases – Joshua Bloch ** Money Saved = $12.04
4. PHP and MySQL Web Development — Luke Welling & Laura Thomson ** Money Saved = $4.34

The best part of these purchases was not the price after all. It was the fact that ALL books shipped the next business day. This has not happened on my Amazon orders in the last 6 months at least. They have this clause that if you use “Free Shipping” then shipping of the order will be delayed by 3-4 days even if the product page said “Usually ships in 24 hours”. My advice: dump big online sellers and go for small sellers who are ready to give better service at a much better price!