Design Critique: Purchasing Experience on Amazon (iOS & Android)
This article focuses on the purchasing experience of consumers when using the Amazon app, from browsing the detail page of products to service after checkout. The opinions are categorized into two parts: the visual design of different pages and the whole checkout experience of users.
Visual
Product detail page
With diverse information related to the product listed on the detail page, Amazon provides consumers with the service as considerate as possible during the buying process. The information includes some of the following parts: pictures of the product from different perspectives, options to choose when purchasing, descriptions of the product, customer ratings, frequently bought together, products related, recommendations, similar items comparison, related brands, customer questions, customer reviews, other items consumers buy, etc. Below the images of some products, users can even click to view the product in their own room with the Augmented Reality technology, which helps them in a more practical way when they are making choices. For the review part, the filter function is nicely applied, through which users can choose to see reviews with different stars, positive or critical reviews, top or recent reviews, etc. This makes the experience more efficient and pleasant.
However, inconvenience is also generated at the same time.
With so much information about one product, the whole page becomes extremely long, especially when each part of the details all occupies a large space even with a “see more” option below. Besides, for some products, there are several parts repeating the same contents. For example, products related, recommendations, and other items customers buy are presenting similar things to users. As a result, users may experience some inconvenience when viewing the page. For one thing, they will easily get lost when scrolling down because of the overwhelming and repeated information; for another, it takes time and energy to find the things they want without navigation or even go back to the top to buy the product.
Furthermore, the order of the details is also not intuitive enough. For some of the customers, the reviews of the product are the information they tend to see first, but it is put almost at the end of the long page. Amazon may realize this fact and makes the stars on the top of the page clickable so that users can go to the reviews directly. However, the stars do not indicate the interaction well enough, and customers can easily miss this shortcut.
There are also some UI details that are not good enough. Firstly, the buttons on the page are quite old-fashioned. Maybe another style could better arouse people’s desire to buy. Also, the “buy now” and “add to basket” buttons of some products have icons on the left side. But the “buy now” icon leads to confusion since there is a mismatch between the indication of the icon and the meaning of “buy now”. Moreover, for the sections that the contents of them can be swiped horizontally, the information of different products is not aligned with each other, which also causes inconvenience when users are swiping.
Basket page
The page of the basket is very clear with the necessary information of the products shown to customers, like the price and whether in stock. But some details could be improved. Except the old-fashioned buttons and the misaligned information of products that are the same to the product detail page, one important thing is that there is no apparent distinction between the core part of the page — the products that are going to be purchased, and the rest — products saved for later and recommended products. Also, the blank space between them is also not enough. As a result, customers will experience confusion when they are scrolling down.
Animation
For some of the products, when clicking on the “buy now” button, a page would appear from the bottom with a “swipe to buy now” button on it. After that, there is an animation of the arrow on the left of the button shown. The animation is a nice one since it not only indicates the swiping interaction very well but also increases customers’ desire to interact with it which leads to the purchasing. However, for some customers, they may not expect to buy it immediately after the interaction without going to a detailing page, and have to go to cancel it if they did not consider it very well.
Checkout process
The checkout experience is crucial in any consumer product app like Amazon. Some small negative feelings could have a huge influence on the purchase experience.
Let’s have a look at amazon’s checkout process.
Step 1: Is this product available or not?
Imagine you want to buy one product from Amazon Echo series. After reading all the reviews about the products online, you made a deliberate choice to buy the Echo Plus 2. On the preview page, you saw “Get it Friday”. Then you think they must be available in stock and could be delivered to your address. However, when you finally decide to checkout, a red notification shows it cannot be shipped to your address.
Users could easily get confused and lose patience in that situation. We guess there might be some related technical reasons, so Amazon is not able to tell users beforehand whether the product is available to their address. In that case, it could still be beneficial to notify users in an interesting and emotional way, instead of a red warning.
Step 2: Add to the shopping cart
When clicking on the “Add to basket” button, the “Proceed to checkout” will sometimes pop up. Clicking on it, users are asked to check out all the stuff in their shopping cart. We consider it nudges users to purchase before they forget and increases the chance of payment. However, this could also lead to negative situations. For example, users may think “checkout” means only buy this product. They proceed to checkout without removing other stuff to “Save for later”. People end up buying all the products there by accident and are likely to feel insecure about this process next time. So, we think it’s necessary to communicate the purchase information more clearly. For example, popping up a message to remind users that they are checking out for several products.
Amazon automatically assumes if you put items in the shopping cart, you want to buy them. But only part of the users will add products to the shopping cart after a deliberate consideration. For the others, who use the shopping cart like another wish list, they need to remove some products one by one each time before checking out.
We agree this is a good way to encourage users to buy more because people tend to avoid loss. But providing flexibility is still important. For instance, letting users check out certain items instead of the entire shopping cart can make people feel more in control.
Step 3: Purchase
Amazon usually provides users with several sellers for one product. Usually only one of them owns the buy box, the yellow button under the product. Other sellers are in the links below. But for some products, all the sellers are listed under the “see all buying options” button.
For the users, they are 2 different purchase procedures. Normally (the first picture), users could buy the product directly by clicking on the buttons below. In the second situation, they need to choose one from the sellers first. This inconsistency could stop users from proceeding to checkout because of confusion and hesitation.
Step 4: Review
As mentioned above, the review function is overall pleasant and efficient. The only concern is that we found people with no purchase can also write a review on Amazon. But they don’t have a “verified purchase” annotation. This seems unnecessary. Why don’t they only allow users to write a review after purchase? One possible answer might be, Amazon also wants to give other people the opportunity to give their advice even if they buy this item elsewhere or nowhere.
Step 5: Buy again
Amazon does a good job in this part, by taking consumer behavior into consideration: people often buy some products more than once. Users can repurchase conveniently in these 2 ways.
First, the “buy again” section selects some of the products users might buy more than once from “your orders”, like the phone film (instead of a phone). With this shortcut, users can easily find and purchase them again.
Also, it allows users to “subscribe” to certain products: set up a plan and purchase them every 1–6 months with a discount. This reduces users’ effort to purchase and create more business value.
Sum up
In this article, we shared our thoughts on the purchasing experience on Amazon.
With sufficient product information and considerate functions like buy again, Amazon tries to provide users with all the necessary functions to ensure an efficient and pleasant purchasing experience. We also see nice interaction design like the “swipe to buy” feature. However, Amazon still seems to be a bit conservative in updating its visual style and doesn’t give enough attention to some visual details. This leads to both inconvenience and less desire to purchase. What’s more, the checkout experience sometimes makes people feel insecure because of unclear information and inconsistent interactions.
Considering Amazon the “Earth’s most customer-centric company”, we hope they could improve the visual details and optimize the check out process.
Written by Doudou Jia & Jun Wang
