Can online shopping experience be tuned better?

Yogesh B
UX in India
Published in
3 min readAug 8, 2015

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I recently turned into an Amazon loyalist. I add a lot of things to my wish-list so that I can buy them later. And a heavy splurge since last two months has made me close to Amazon.

Things that I find interesting, I add them to my wish-list. A few days back, I did the same and then returned back to the homepage to see what other things were on offer.

Amongst other things that people were looking at, I found an unusual product — a pendant amongst the few items it showed.

The unusual product that got me curious

Out of curiosity, I click the product and came to the product page. Its not something I would buy, but I was curious to know how much would people be willing to spend on this.

I scrolled down further to see other details and it suggested that this pendant was frequently bought together with a portable USB LED Lamp. Really?

Just because I have looked at few products, doesn’t means that I would be interested in buying the two together. I understand when it suggested a mobile cover while I was looking at a mobile phone, but a pendant along with a USB light?

Fair. I returned to the homepage to see what are the other things on offer. And it started recommending me other ornaments. Its interesting to see how one curious click triggered all these recommendations.

Recommendations based on my curious click

Obviously I wanted to change that. So I logged out and logged in back to see what changed. And now it started recommending the Air fryer that I had already bought from Amazon.

When I did a re-login

Amongst this series of experience, what I felt odd was that it showed me products that I was interested in, but have already purchased from Amazon. This could be easily handled by keeping a check on things that I buy. And not recommend it for x no. of days. In most categories, there are very low chances that a consumer will buy the same product again immediately.

What could have Amazon done to make my experience really personal and not get governed by a curious click.

I would like to hear from people who have had similar or other strange and funny instances while shopping online. Were you able to come up with ideas on how your experience could be improved? Lets discuss. I would like to hear from you in the comments below.

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Yogesh B
UX in India

Mostly tweets about Design, UX, Products, Marketing and startups. Lover of food and outdoors. Follow me as @pixelfiesta