[philsnow]

Some product pages have images that zoom when you hover them, some instead have images that pop open in a (terrible) lightbox. No rhyme or reason as far as I can tell why some are one way and some are the other.

Especially for electronics or computer parts, if you don't know _exactly_ what you're looking for down to the part/model number, you're not going to get any help on amazon.com. I get the feeling they don't do any actual categorization (like say newegg seems to do) and instead you're actually getting just full-text search on product descriptions.

If you really want the part soon, you'd be fine with either "Prime" or "Prime FREE One-Day", right? But you can't search for both at the same time, for some reason they are mutually exclusive. So you duplicate the browser tab and search for "Prime" options in one and "Free One-Day" options in the other, like a caveman banging two tabs^W rocks together. I just noticed there's yet another option, a checkbox under "Delivery day" reading "Get It by Tomorrow".

If you _do_ know exactly what you want, good luck getting it because of the whole similar products from different sources getting intermingled in inventory.

I'm frankly blown away by how user-hostile the whole thing is. Prime shipping buys a lot of goodwill, it seems.

[hef19898]

Up until two or three ywars ago Amazon did a tremendous job on catalogue data. Then the catalogue started to show the first issues of bad master data. It is hard work to maintain such large set of product master data, sure. But in the end I had the feeling that quality decreased. Add marketplace and third parties to the mix and it is a complex problem that needs constant maintenance directly impacting CX.