Comments on: Amazon.ca Fails at Basic Usability – Amazon.com Passes

By: Neil Mudde

Neil Mudde — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 12:44:46 +0000

I received a $50.00 amazon.ca gift certificate and decided to purchases a mp3 player. The certificate clearly states “amazon.ca” will only redeem my certificate.
I did the sign up thing, then started to place the order either “quick click” or proceed to check out to no avail, I once ended up with 9x the item at check out, I have 6 of my same addresses listed when clicking on ’shipping to” nothing happens, I sent a note to amazon.ca who told me to contact amazon.com? even though my certificate states it is “ca” so has anyone had this experience and what did you do to finally get your stuff?
Would appreciate your comments, help
Neil neilm_to@yahoo.com

By: Linda Bustos

Linda Bustos — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 18:06:49 +0000

LOL, yep I eventually found it too, looking forward to its arrival

By: Dr. Pete

Dr. Pete — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 17:17:17 +0000

Interesting; I’m surprised the Canadian site uses a different engine. That seems unusual for a big, international presence like Amazon.

I guess I managed to find Avinash’s book, though, as I’m reading it right now

By: Alexis Brion

Alexis Brion — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 15:08:15 +0000

I do totally agree. I use Amazon.com as a good design example very often in blog. Unfortunately, I can not say the same about Amazon.de (I live in Germany right now), the German version is like a trip to the 90’s.

By: paulinepauline

paulinepauline — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 23:14:52 +0000

amazon germany has no results for “Web Analytics: An Hour A Da” but I was successful with the search term “landing pages” … strange.

By: Linda Bustos

Linda Bustos — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 22:56:57 +0000

Hi Dave,

Yep, we Canadians are getting the “cold shoulder.” Amazon.com’s got tagging, video, blogs etc. and we have bilingual buttons, tombstones and bizarre recommendations…example:

Amazon “personally” recommends tome Michael Buble’s Christmas album. I click on “Why is this recommended for you?” – and the reason is because I bought a Hannah Montana CD for my niece last year. I don’t see how the recommendation relates at all to this purchase, unless parents buying H.M. “also bought” Michael Buble at the same time.

By: Dave Walker

Dave Walker — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 22:19:17 +0000

What a timely post! I looked up some CDs for my mother for Christmas on Amazon.com – easy as pie. I love Amazon.com. Useable, interactive and highly useful. Unfortunately, they couldn’t ship before Christmas unless I paid the highest shipping fee.

I jumped over to Amazon.ca, which I hadn’t visited in years. Nothing’s changed – I feel like I arrived in 1998. No suggestions, abysmal search, no reviews – didn’t feel like anything in the Amazon family.

I’ve always felt that Canadian versions of US sites are very poor cousins to their American counterparts – nothing reinforced this opinion like Amazon.ca. Very, very disappointed.

By: Linda Bustos

Linda Bustos — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 21:26:45 +0000

I just whipped over to B&N, AbeBooks, Chapters/Indigo and Alibris and they all failed the typo test.

For “landing pages” Chapters.indigo.ca passed (Go Canucks Go), and AbeBooks delivered somewhat relevant search (Search Marketing for Dummies). Barnes and Noble and Alibris had nothin’.

By: Linda Bustos

Linda Bustos — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 20:25:43 +0000

@eCopt,

Now that our loonie’s going back down, we’re all crawling back to our Canadian ecommerce sites

Fuzzy logic has been around for a long time, I’d be surprised if Amazon’s just experimenting with that now. I know I’m being a bit hard on Ammy, and it didn’t cause them to lose the sale, I just tried my searches again until they worked

Being a marketer and not a developer, I do appreciate the genius that is put into search functionality tweaking, and it’s probably harder than I think – I was just stunned that the 2 sites were using different engines, and that I ran into speedbumps twice in the same shopping session. Usually my experience with Amazon is much sharper.

Hopefully Amazon will notice in their internal search logs the issue and will fix this soon (on a case-by-case basis). I’ll run a search on the same query in a month and see if they’ve fixed it for these terms (or if they read our blog, LOL).

By: eCopt

eCopt — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 20:15:00 +0000

Very interesting, nice eye Linda, but who would use Canadian search engines anyway?

I think they are using the .com to test on at the moment. Certain technology or design implementations may not be rolled out on their subversions. To me, that’s the only thing that makes sense, but think how much business they are missing out on by doing that? You’d think the things you pointed out would be a no brainer for Amazon, I would understand if it were some of the smaller sellers, but not Amazon.