How would you improve Amazon.com or Amazon.in?

A lot of users often come to Amazon, are not able to find the right product or decide on the right product and end up buying the products which are available on Amazon from other platforms.

GOAL

So I would choose the goal of improvement to improve the funnel conversion - from user coming to amazon - searching for a product - comparing products - buying it - posting reviews on the product - coming back to Amazon and buying

something else.

USERS

We can categorise users into three categories

Users who exactly know what product they want to buy

Users who exactly know what type of product they want to buy but not the exact company or brand

Users who do not know what they want to buy

Let’s focus on users who know what type of product they want to buy but not the exact brand or company since we could get a lot more orders from such users if we help them in decision making process.

PAINPOINTS

One area where I feel Amazon could improve is the pre-buying experience where user needs to do the research about multiple products and finalise on one product that he or she will buy.

Amazon does provide user reviews and ratings but often new items do not have a lot of review and ratings.

They cannot reach out to people who have bought this product.

They have to use different websites or YouTube Videos or google customer opinions about the product.

Also every user will have different expectations from a product so even if the product reviews are good, his or her expectations may not be matched. In that case you need some expert opinion, may be from someone who has brought the product, knows inside out about the product and someone who knows your requirements well too.

Also sometimes certain products may match your budget but may not have good reviews and vice versa in that case, you should know about alternate products which you can go for instead of what you searched for.

SOLUTIONS

SOLUTION 1 - high impact, low effort

Allowing the user to add friends by searching users on Amazon as well as by supporting login through Facebook or Google SSO.

We can show which of their friends have brought similar products and any user can chat with them on Amazon and know more about the product.

SOLUTION 2 - High impact , high effort

Amazon can assign an expert on request in case user is not able to decide. This can be a part of the prime service.

SOLUTION 3 - Medium impact, low effort

Allow users to chat with any user who has brought the product and get opinion from them

SOLUTION 4 - High impact - medium effort

Create blogs and provide links on results page. These blogs should have links to products on amazon

For eg. blogs such as Headphones below 5000, HD TVs below 20000

Tradeoffs

1 - not finding many people who have brought the product - friends on social networks, not many people added as friends on amazon

2- expensive option, as we need to hire people for this who would keep answering queries from users

3-good solution but other users may not like them being pinged multiple times on amazon by prospective buyers of the product

4-need writers or experts who know about products from different categories — may not be able to cover all categories. They can make use of other tech blogs or websites etc and link them to amazon. Amazon can hire freelancers to do research for this on a need basis.

I think I will definitely build solution 4 and 1 for starters since both have high impact and medium or low effort.

Metrics

I would look at

number of orders per user per month

Conversion funnel - from coming on amazon to purchase of a product

Conversion time - if possible to track from user started search on a product to purchase of the product

Amit J · Answer 2 · 2021-11-28T06:26:07+0000

Amazon is a leader in e-Commerce which provides customers the best possible selection at lowest prices with utmost experience.

Clarifying questions:

1) What do we mean by improvement?

- Does it mean more usage of amazon.com by customer - is it for returning customers or new sign ups?

- is it increasing overall revenue? improving Operating margin?

- is it improvement in Churn rate?

- is it increasing engagement?

- Is it increasing prime subscription?

- is it improving it on specific interface Web or mobile?

User groups

In order to do so, lets study Amazon distinct user groups:

1) Amazon Prime customer

2) Amazon Non-prime Customers and can be further divided into Power shoppers, Ocassional Shoppers and Casual Shoppers.

In order to further simplify, i would like to take a goal of increasing usage of amazon.com for power shoppers and my success metrics would be converting increasing prime members among power shoppers who are currently non-prime customers.

Lets look at userjourney of non-prime power shopper customer:

User wants to shop -> Login to amazon.com to browse the selection - > read reviews / ratings -> search for right price on other websites - > Add to cart / make payment -> Delivery -> Receive the product/Write review -> Return (Optional) -> Go back to step 1 again.

lets look at user pain points in each part of his/her journey and how it impacts the user

User journey	Pain Point	Impact to User
User wants to shop	Users need minimum $25 for free delivery on amazon and even other e-commerce websites	High
Login to Amazon.com to browse	Overwhelmed with Choice, can’t choose the right product	High
read reviews / ratings	Does user get the right review that he/she is expecting from product	Medium
search for right price on other websites	Want to make sure not paying higher than what other e-commerce is offering	high
Add to cart / make payment	Not applicable	N/A
Delivery	Deliver the product on time and save delivery fee is possible	High
Receive the product/Review	Simple easy steps to review the product to help other users	Low
Return	N/A	Amazon has done wonderful job in easing the job of return through multiple channels

Using above, I will prioritize and recommend solutions

1) User wants to shop

Non-Prime customers have to atleast get $25 in cart to get free shipping which is already very competetive than other e-commerce where you need to shop atleast $25-$50 to qualify for free shipping. But Since amazon already offers free 1 month of prime for non-prime to convert them to prime but Since our motive is to increase engagement with power shoppers on amazon.com and we want them to come back to amazon.com again for shopping.

a) here is the situation, where power shopper users wants to buy again after placing an order on amazon.com but have to wait now to get minimum $25 on cart, i understand amazon has added a new feature where amazon provides them free shipping to add more item in next 24 hours but customers are not aware about it. but if we send them text, email about free shipping for next 24 hours, they would like to come back and shop again on amazon.com

b) Use intelligence AI tool to understand what products customers like, where customer has spend time on browisng page, which month or week customer does more shopping, and accordingly lure them back with 1 week of free prime to come back on Amazon.com and also send them emails on certain products when its available

2) Login to Amazon.com to browse the products

I believe Amazon.com do a lot better here by not cluttering the products on Mobile interface

c) Sort by price , right now amazon provide a range of min and max price like <$25, $25-$50 etc but if they let user to input min and max on their own , it will help them to get the right selection

d) Use the AI tool at backend to continuously indexing the products which are getting sold as best seller etc (this solution might be there already)

e) provide easy 30 sec tutorials to educate users to accelerate their search like use of "inverted commas" for certain keywords etc

3) search for price on other websites

f) Since Amazon is a e-commerce infrastructure platform now and has >60% of goods sold from 3rd party. Amazon can add a feature if there are sellers who are ready to match/beat price for identical products like what other retailer like target and Walmart does sometimes. Amazon can put a small tag like "price match" for aproduct like it does as "Amazon choice" or "Best Seller". Amazon can go extra mile to allow "price match feature" to be used by user until return period is over which goes with amazon leadership principles of "Being customer obsessed"

Priortize the recommendation and sort it by impact to Amazon.com on increasing power shopper engagement and efforts to build:

Recommendation	Impact to Amazon.com	Efforts to build
Solution (A)	High	Medium – not a big effort
Solution (B)	High	High
Solution (C)	Low	Low
Solution (D)	Medium	Low
Solution (E)	Low	Medium
Solution (F)	High	Medium

using above Table, i will priortize Solution (A) and Solution (F) which are reminding customers to shop with free delivery for next 24 hours when they placed an order and provide solution on price match guarantee.

Success Metrics:

1) % of increase spending by Power shoppers (Non-Prime)

2) % Conversion of Power shopper (Non-Prime) to prime

3) % reduction in Avg time between repeat purchase from Amazon.com from power shoppers