In our most recent Amazon update, we mentioned an improvement in mobile product content. It’s about time. Amazon years ago redesigned its main site to be more tablet friendly, but A+ content on mobile has continued to look sloppy and confusing.
Danny Silverman of Etailing Solutions recently notified us about a halfway-decent Amazon product page on mobile, for this Colgate toothbrush. The product description is found after ordering info and social options, but it’s there.
Even with this cleaner version of A+ content, there’s no distinction between image captions, hyperlink text, and the text of the description itself.
For comparison, here’s what many A+ product pages on Amazon have looked like on mobile for the past couple of years (follow the link to see the desktop version).
To be fair, following this blur of text is a second description with headers and line breaks, but without any other formatting, it’s not much better.
Since introducing the templates last fall, Amazon has strongly encouraged vendors to use them, and we suspect mobile is part of that push. It seems reasonable that the Vendor Central self-service templates would offer an easier way for Amazon to transfer product content from desktop to mobile.
Unfortunately, templated descriptions look only marginally better on mobile than other A+ content. And templated product descriptions arguably look worse on computer screens.
For all the ways Amazon has set the bar in e-commerce, its mobile showing leaves something to be desired. As content26 CEO Tony Martinelli said:
Amazon’s current one-size-fits-all approach to mobile content fails to address an important question: What do consumers expect to find when they search for products on mobile sites versus full sites?
Maybe we can’t confidently answer that question yet, but Amazon could certainly improve the look of their mobile A+ product content. Main site A+ product content is loaded with information–complete descriptions, concise explanations of features and benefits, summary headers, relevant captions, useful images, and more. There must be a better way to take all that information and repackage it for mobile in a way that is visually appealing.
What sites do you think Amazon should be emulating when it comes to mobile product content?
