Amazon Hacks

Amazon Product Pages

The core activities at Amazon.com are browsing, searching, and purchasing products. If you’ve spent any time at Amazon.com, then you know it has millions of products in dozens of categories beyond the books for which it is primarily known. Thinking of the site in terms of individual pages is overwhelming; thinking in terms of page templates is much more manageable. A template is like a document shell that can be used over and over again to display information. The shell is filled with whatever information is requested at the time. In these terms, Amazon has only a handful of templates, including search results, category home pages, and product detail pages. Looking at the structure instead of the information makes it much easier to understand how Amazon operates.

Every Amazon page offers information for your perusal, and actions you can perform. Information includes book titles, prices, customer reviews—anything that adds to your knowledge of products and helps you make a buying decision. Actions include adding a product to your cart or Wish List, posting a review, rating an item, making a purchase—anything that explicitly provides Amazon.com with input or a directive.

You can think of a product detail page as the home page of a particular item at Amazon. It’s the workhorse of Amazon.com, and studying what’s available there provides insight into almost all of the site’s features. Figure 1-1 shows a typical product detail page, this one for Google Hacks, a sibling ...