Agreed. Another roadblock I hate is requiring me to enter my full name and address before they give tax & shipping info. A simple zip code field & calculate price button should not be that hard.
Does anybody publish some decent design guidelines for online shopping sites? So many sites try to follow Amazon without realizing Amazon can get away with terrible design choices because they are so massive.
If you're going to require a zip code to ship, because you only ship to the US, wouldn't it be nice if you said so up-front, so I could avoid wasting half an hour comparing your totally effing useless-to-me products to retailers that actually want to sell to me?
Couldn't agree more; as soon as I get a whiff of a website trying to dig more information out of me than it needs to perform a specific function, my tolerance for everything else on the website drops considerably.
"To calculate shipping, please enter all your personal info, credit card and hours a day no one is at your house."
As for Amazon, you are right; I think they make up for it with good prices and an excellent shopping experience. In a way, I think they can get away with it because they are so good at what they do.
I wish to go AWS Payments would allow payments without an account though so it could be used in lieu of PayPal... but that is an aside.
Does anybody publish some decent design guidelines for online shopping sites? So many sites try to follow Amazon without realizing Amazon can get away with terrible design choices because they are so massive.