Gordaen's Blog

Too bad I’m not talking about the river. Amazon.com used to be a great site, which started in a garage in Seattle, quickly growing into a Fortune 500 company. Unfortunately, the huge income hasn’t lead to the investment in good web designers or presidents/VP’s with any vision. I tell people regularly how terrible I think the site is due to overbloated javascript junk for every flashy little thing possible. A site is about accessibility and Amazon falls so short a toddler could step on them.

Don’t believe me, try looking at the Silktide Sitescore results for Amazon! When I checked, their accessibility scored 0.5 out of 10 (Note: It has since changed to 5.7)! That alone probably wouldn’t have caused me to blog about how terrible the user experience can be going to their site, but then this happened.

That was what I saw after adding Terry Goodkind’s latest book to my cart (along with some other things, but I found TG’s book to be the culprit) and trying to check out. Apparently, the book I added through their page isn’t in their catalogue. When I tried to go back to the page, I found a mixture of 404 errors and versions of the page without a buy button. When your page is so terrible that it drives business away, it’s time to rethink your strategy.

I sent them an e-mail after browsing around for too long on their Help page to find the contact section. We’ll see what kind of reply they send…

Edit: For the record, they sent a generic reply that did not help at all.