It’s no longer Amazon.com. Its become Amazon.cn and a poor user experience 😞

Amazon.com used to be the envy of all ecommerce businesses, and many copied everything about them, from their navigation to the product pages. And it used to be one of the best user experiences.

But not anymore. Why?

Because Amazon.com has become Amazon.cn!

1000’s of Chinese low quality rip-off products from unheard of brands have now inundated Amazon and search results pages. Many of them even fake.

All these products are now getting in the way when you want to browse for trusted brand products, and they are all screaming for your attention.

This makes it very hard to research and find products you are looking for.

Amazon’s search results and category pages are now too hard to use

I have been doing CRO and UX for 15 years now.

And I can honestly say that Amazon.com search results and category pages are some of the worst in ecommerce now.

They are filled with sponsored products from Chinese brands you don’t know or trust, and that often don’t relate well to what you are looking for.

And worthless ‘Amazon’s Choice’ badges, which seem like sellers can just ‘purchase’ to trick people into clicking them. And in this case below, Amazon’s Choice is often sponsored! Not great for building trust.

And poor quality ‘recommended articles’ (written by affiliates) show up in search results, which are often promoting these Chinese low-quality products from unheard of brands. These are really quite unhelpful, and get in the way.

Their filtering options are also often not useful, inconsistent across category and search results pages, and are often sluggish to use. The types of filters being offered are often not very good.

And there is certainly no point in sorting by highest rated, as I just don’t believe the reviews anymore.

A much better example of category page with excellent user experience is AO.com. Their product listings are much more helpful and more detailed, their filtering is much better and more useful (like they offer a ‘features’ filter which is very helpful), and they don’t have sponsored results that get in the way like at Amazon.

Amazon’s product pages are spammy and fake

The product pages of these low quality Chinese products are mainly filled with spammy titles (optimized for search results — not humans), poorly translated English descriptions, spelling mistakes, superimposed fake images, and 1000’s of fake reviews. And many of them are of course ‘Amazon’s Choice’ like this interesting product…

Is there no quality control on Amazon now, let alone proper checks for fake rip-off products? It’s often hard to tell if a product is actually genuine or not.

And the fake reviews issue is huge,and has been talked about for years, yet nothing really seems to change. It’s still simple to buy fake reviews.

Amazon has slowly become a truly terrible user experience over the last few years, and has also resulted in much lower trust levels.

It also really devalues Amazon Prime next day delivery — who cares about that when you can’t find what you want to buy? And there many complaints that service isn’t as good as it used to be either, and often isn’t next day.

One of the only positive things about Amazon is their customer service which is still often excellent, which was one of the four pillars of success of Amazon that Jeff Bezos ingrained in the company.

And of course their low prices, but those often put other smaller ecommerce websites out of business, giving more power to Amazon.

I use Amazon much less now, and I also trust them much less. This is very disappointing because I’ve been a big fan since I started using them in 1995.

What to do instead of using Amazon

Now I use websites like AO.com and JohnLewis.com that have exceptional user experiences, and make it very easy to research and find exactly what you are looking for — and I trust them too. And they don’t have low quality Chinese products from unheard of brands getting in the way!

Or I research products on websites like consumer review websites like Which, and then find the product I want on a small business ecommerce website and support them instead. I suggest that you do too!

Who else feels this way? I’m sure I’m not the only one.