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Amazon Store: Usability

Published by marco on

After having listened to an excellent interview with the author on What we don’t talk about when we talk about rape, I’d recently added the book Rape: From Lucretia to #MeToo by Mithu Sanyal to my Amazon Wishlist.

Soon after, I received an e-mail from Amazon that they were giving me a one-week, five-dollar coupon toward the purchase of the book. That sounded good to me. I clicked through to the book’s page, where I saw that, indeed, a five-dollar credit would be applied were I to purchase the book.

 Initial Offer

However, when I elected to “Buy now with 1-Click”, I landed on an order-summary page that showed a different coupon for $3.04 had been applied, but that my original $5 coupon was missing.

 'Place Order' Screen

I thought maybe it had something to do with 1-click, so I turned that off in the settings. FYI: you can’t disable 1-click purchasing on Amazon. There’s an option to disable it, but it doesn’t actually disable anything. But I digress, because that’s a whole other usability/false-advertising problem.

Since it was only a matter of a few bucks, I took the chance that Amazon’s site was just incapable of displaying a one-time-only coupon as well as a previous credit. I could hide the old credit, but couldn’t get it to show me the coupon. I placed my order and was greeted with the following order summary.

 'Order Summary' Page

Both credits had been applied on the final order, which is good. That a site that handles over 50% of America’s (and probably much of the West’s) purchases doesn’t have a portal that can display the details of slightly more-complicated orders is not.