Forum Moderators: buckworks
Amazon used to be quick and easy to buy from but now there is so much junk on the pages you have to scroll for half a mile to read product reviews & they put all kinds of stuff on the page of questionable use or relevance.
p.com & others now have those things that expand product details when you mouse over the product which is great if you want to see more info about a particular product but when you are trying to browse a page of product listings it gets really annoying. It slows down the site, can make the browser stick and respond slowly.
Go to shopping.com, view a product page and click on "see product details" and they throw a page of AdWords at you and show the product details way down at the bottom of the page. Then you click on a link to go to a site to buy a product and you have to wait a few seconds while that Shopping.com branded "Thank-you for using Shopping.com We Hope We've Made Your Shopping Fast & Easy" interstitial slows down the whole process before you actually get to the merchant site.
Overstock in particular has that live person thing that hounds you like a used car salesman who hasn't eaten for 2 weeks and there seems to be no way to make it go away and stop chasing you.
Buy.com has some of the bloat of Amazon but doesn't clutter up the page anywhere near as much as Amazon.
Then you have Zappos and other sites that are still nice and simple, easy to use, browse and buy from but this is starting to seem more like the exception than the rule. Ebay is generally still pretty easy to browse, navigate and buy from.
With Amazon doing so well lately, maybe bloat works well or maybe their earnings get juiced from the revenue their text ads generate.
What's the trend, bloat or use of ease?
Do you prefer all the stuff Amazon is starting to include on a page or the simplicity of Zappos?
Could the "bloat" companies be so wrapped up in their analytics and statistics that they forget to go out and look at their sites to see what the shopping experience is really like?
Does this spell opportunity for new companies to keep everything simple, fast & easy and keep the shopping process nice and streamlined?
Amazon, GoDaddy, any auto parts site, all have endless complexity - probably the downside to the Long Tail. Too much crap to sift through and too many related item sales attempts followed up by 14 page checkout procedures. Makes a person want to pop down to the local store to pay cash.
But they almost always trend toward bloat, 'added features', excess advertising, data mining, glitz, etc. IMO
guess craigslist is an exception....
May be the name is keeping them still alive.
Habtom
I think Godaddy is teh biggest offender, drives me nuts
That is true. I once got an account and everything was so congested after browsing for hours and hours, I left. I don't remember what I was looking for, but i remember receiving an email from them saying I had unsubscribed and my money was refunded. With that all mess, I must have done it, but boy, I was very happy.
[edited by: Habtom at 9:58 am (utc) on July 2, 2007]
Many sites go overboard with "May We Suggest?" Are more than 2 or 3 domestic shipping options necessary? We offer JUST ONE, with a request for customers to phone us if they need air, at much higher cost. I could go on and on with examples of detrimental clutter.
I regularly go thru our sites with a eye on removing unnecessary feature and product bloat.
I regularly go thru our sites with a eye on removing unnecessary feature and product bloat.
The real artist knows he is done not when there is nothing left to add, but rather when there is nothing left to be taken away?
I hate it with a passion now - they could at least show a sign in the listings of genuine "from Amazon" items.
And the proliferation of comparison shopping sites has not helped - made it worse I think. They are so filled up with clutter and junk it is almost impossible to find what you are looking for.
I think the time is ripe for some etailer to have a simple easy to use site with no flash-bang, animations, and assorted crap.
I think it's a trend that successful businesses always seem to go through. It's like a small government... The bigger it gets, the more bloated it gets. When companies start, there's a few people in charge... Maybe even one person. But then they go public... Now you've got board members, consultants, marketing experts... They all just keep on wanting to hire more and more people, and those people want to add more stuff. Pretty soon it's just a big mess with everybody sitting around all day having meetings about when they're going to have their next meeting, which leads to the proverbial $200 government screwdriver style of doing business.
Last time I drove by Yahoo's building, I counted three different rooms packed with people doing meetings... And each of those people had their own idea of how to change everything no doubt.
Dave
