eCommerce Ease-of-Use Notes: Amazon Sets the Standard

I buy a ton of stuff on the internet. I say that not so much to mean that I buy a ton of stuff, but that I buy a roughly typical amount of stuff, but a disproportionately large amount of it on the internet. So I see a lot of eCommerce sites.

What I find is that very few match the attention-to-detail and ease-of-use of Amazon. In some cases, no doubt that reflects Amazon's massive advantages of scale, They can afford a lot more user-experience and software development. But then again, some things are pretty basic, and easily copied.

Three things that I hate come to mind:

1. Verified by Visa. As far as I am concerned, it is awful. I have read defenses of it, so maybe there is another side to the story. But if there is--Visa and their partners have done a terrible job of telling that story. If Amazon can get along fine without it, why would a consumer expect or put up with it elsewhere? (And as noted in my post, an unforgivably poor job of implementing the VbV process during checkout. Given the subject of this post, an ironic counter-example of lack of attention to usability).

2. CVV codes. I HATE having to remember this when I check out from a website. Adding to the irritation--if you left out some other required piece of data, it rests the CVV code. Creating both irritating and often confusing behavior. E.g., I enter everything but my phone number, for example. The SUBMIT fails, prompting for my phone number. Fine. I re-submit, but it fails again, now because of missing CVV code. Irritating if I realize, confusing if I think there is some other field still missing.

3. Captchas. Oh how I loathe them. I must be especially captcha-challenged, but I often find it takes 2-3 tries to get it right.

One possibility is that Amazon's scale may somehow give them a critical advantage that smaller sites don't have. Maybe they feel they can take losses that smaller sites aren't willing to take. Or maybe they extract better terms from credit card companies. But from the consumer perspective, it hardly matters--just more factors to making Amazon the path of least resistance.