UI designer Joshua Porter:
The reality is that Amazon has designed themselves into a Local Maximum. They’ve tested and tweaked the same product page over and over and they’ve optimized it as much as possible. They can’t improve it significantly at this point without making a big change. But they can’t make a big change because the only changes they can make must increase revenue (or some closely related KPI). So any big change is a very, very scary thing when that page is driving billions of dollars in revenue. So it makes sense that Amazon only makes small changes to their product page design.
Early in my web career, like many others I was fascinated by Amazon’s web design and leveraged it occasionally to fuel e-commerce decisions. But when you fast forward to where we are today, it’s positively shocking how little Amazon’s design has evolved. Joshua really nails why.