Amazon’s online retail offer has been industry-leading since its inception, but how has its ecommerce website developed?

Launching in 1998, Amazon.co.uk is about to turn 18. It’s done an awful lot of maturing along the way, both in terms of its business model and creating a user experience that most consumers are familiar with, even if it does not always follow best practice UX principles.

Looking at the 2000 version of the site we can see that there had already been expansion into new ranges, with books being joined by music.

The focus of much of the homepage information is around helping the customer to understand how to shop online, and highlighting that online shopping is safe, two things we tend to take for granted in 2016.

The design of the site looks basic compared with today, but many consumers would have only had dial-up internet access.

At the same time, Amazon was already trying to push mobile shopping; albeit through a WAP site that would also have suffered from slow data speeds.

Delivery destiny

Moving on to 2003 and there had been an explosion in categories sold on the site.

Free delivery had recently been reduced for orders over £25, which was to become the backbone of Amazon’s customer acquisition strategy; and arguably Amazon set customer expectations of free delivery that the industry has been stuck with ever since.

By this point Amazon was also serving up personalised content to customers who signed in, based on their previous activity on the site.

Amazon Web Services also launched in 2003, an important development for the business as it’s now considered an industry-standard for web hosting

More than a decade later, many other websites are yet to achieve this level of sophistication.

Amazon Web Services also launched in 2003, an important development for the business as it’s now considered an industry-standard for web hosting.

However, its push into being a platform provider for other retailers did not prove so successful, with Mothercare, Marks & Spencer and even competitor Waterstones all adopting and then moving away from sites built on Amazon’s proprietary technology.

Category collateral

By 2006 its DVD rental service had been up and running for a couple of years in what was an early foray into selling content rather than products that then extended to music downloads, video downloads and book downloads via Kindle.

Finally, in 2009, a navigation change from the top to the left-hand side exposed more sub-categories than in the previous design.

Between 2012 and 2015 little changed in the design of the homepage, as the site instead focused on its product range and service proposition (including the birth of Prime)

This side navigation design was popular at the time, but by 2012 Amazon had moved back to the top navigation and drop-down menu which featured its now extensive category list.

Between 2012 and 2015 little changed in the design of the homepage, as the site instead focused on its product range and service proposition (including the birth of Prime).

By 2016 the design template has seen its first fundamental shift in years and now there is a clear header bar to the site alongside the giant dropdown mega menu.

  • Mark Pinkerton is director of optimisation at Practicology