Amazon.com: A Short Time Lapse
Amazon.com went live in December 1998 and is a top visited website to this day. But, how much has amazon.com changed since its beginnings? A lot. It was atrociously boring at first, to be honest, but I’m assuming all websites were.
In its beginning, pictures were one-dimensional and this lasted up until the mid-2000’s. The advertisements were just as big as the other pictures and everything seemed like a list. In the search tabs on the home page, there were only three. This was something interesting that I decided to look at through the progession of the website.
It started off as three tabs one being, “See All 32 Product Categories.” You would click this and be able to see all of the categories. Then in 2000, the top tabs on the home page went to nine which included: Welcome, Books, Music, DVD & Video, Electronics & Software, Toys & Video Games, Home Improvement, Auctions and zShops.
In 2002, there were also nine tabs, but below those tabs was a link to Target products, and a link to “Sell Your Stuff.” The sell your stuff link is very revolutionary because it allowed people to be involved with the website. Instead of being an observer, they have the opportunity to easy click the tab on the home screen and become part of this website by easily selling their products. In 2005 the tabs went back to, “See All Product Categories,” and the browse on the left side of the page had easier navigations. Today, there is one small search bar on the top and a drop down menu where a person can go to a specific department. It most likely ended up this way because as a society, we have evolved to be uncomfortably fast paced. We know what we want and we want it fast. If we’re going to go on amazon.com, we generally know what we’re looking for and don’t need an entire left side of the home page dedicated for browsing tools.
If Amazon does want us to browse, they created the “Related to Items you’ve viewed” category on the home page. This concept began in 2000 when a user could sign in and get “personal recommendations.”
This is also a revolutionary idea because, currently, the internet is personal, but at that time I don’t believe many shopping websites were. People, again, want to feel like an active participant when they’re online so by giving recommendations, it makes people feel that way.
In 2004, Amazon Theater was available. This was a day when five short films were to be shown during the winter holidays, which I believe was the precursor to being able to watch and rent movies online today.
Something strange that I noticed was how the Amazon Kindle is advertised. ALthough yes, amazon was origionally focused on books, it seems starge that this has been the main product they promote since it came out. Since announcing the device in 2008, it was been advertised as one of their biggest photos on their front page.
While amazon.com has changed drastically over the 17 years it has been live online, there are something aspects that I wonder why they haven’t tried. Amazon.com is one of the earliest websites to be created and actively used, still to this day. With a society that is so focused on visuals, I wonder why Amazon does not incorporate short videos to show products. For example, instead of having a television with dimensions they could advertise the television by showing a video graphic with the dimensions imbedded in the video. I also noticed with a lot of clothing like on zappos.com there will be a video of someone walking with the product on, like this one.
To take a look at amazon’s life span yourself go to this link.
