Amazon sites: mobile web customer experience needs improvement

I love shopping on Amazon sites because of the best prices and great shopping experience, useful product reviews, great customer service and convenience. As you also know I am a big fan all mobile. In this blog post I wanted to share my experience as mobile customer shopping starting with Mobile Web first, providing some suggestions along the way.

Mobile web customer traffic will surprise many. My friend at Blue Nile (online diamond store) said more than 10% of buyers use mobile phones. About the same amount of Capital One new credit cards applications are filed on mobile phone browsers. Discussion why people buy diamonds and apply for a credit cards on their phone will not reverse trend of increasing customers using mobile devices to browse online stores and make purchases. Bad mobile site customer experience will drive down conversion rate and consequently good one will enhance it. Losing mobile revenue and diminishing mobile customer experience many online retailers would like to avoid.

My Amazon.com mobile shopping experience is rather decent. Home page is optimized for a mobile browser. With few exceptions, buttons are right size and the home page is not overloaded with content – which could be nightmare on small screen. The site even detects which mobile phone OS user is browsing from and prompt to download corresponding app from app store. Amazon site browsing and purchasing is relatively easy on a mobile phone as you can see from the screenshots below.

However, I think some improvements can be made to the home page, which I highlighted on screenshots below. There is empty space to the right of Today’s Deals, Books, DVD and Music. The same time the mentioned categories are too small for a human finger and bunched together with much empty space available to the right. Space to the right can be used to increase those buttons/controls. 'More categories' button opens another page with another list of tiny categories with lots of white space to the right. I do not have data on what categories mobile customers are looking for and hope most looked after are easily accessible. I cannot get to Amazon’s clothing and apparel easily - the items that offer much higher margins than DVDs, books or music. Ensuring customer can easily get to softlines is important for profitability. 'Sign In' button is too small also – buyer will not purchase unless they signed in – I accidentally hit ‘Feedback’ instead because 'Sign In' is too small.

Recommendations:

1. Make all buttons and controls finger/touch friendly
2. Ensure home screen has most commonly used by mobile customers category list
3. Make available categories with higher margins (softlines) easily accessible from the home screen

When I browsed other Amazon retail properties: My Habit, Endless and ShopBop from my mobile phone, the experience was not mobile-optimized at all as you can see from screenshots below. I viewed the same content as I would have on my desktop. Mobile optimization work here is just starting. Sites need to be optimized by 

1. Listening and observing mobile web customer: needs, habits, action, trends, etc
2. Prioritizing content from each site and making it available based on relevancy to mobile web customer, optimizing small screen real estate
3. Simplifying overall experience and design to ensure ease of use

Endless, in my opinion, needs the most work to appeal to mobile web customer. From screenshots below you can see that site is rather cluttered with options for desktop user. While many visuals size is OK, text is very hard to read without zooming in.

Screenshots below of My Habit and ShopBop are less cluttered and the visuals also viewed better on the mobile screen. But text is also too small making it hard to navigate and select needed options. While the sites are friendlier for mobile user than Endless, they still need work to prioritize in terms of relevancy and ease of use to mobile web customer.

And finally, adding a couple of screenshots of mobile sites that I view have one of the best mobile web customer experience: Starbucks and Kayak. As you can see neither site waste precious real estate of mobile screen and the same time items are right size. Content is highly relevant for mobile customer.