Amazon Breaks Their Site

Used to be you could surf Amazon completely without cookies. They’d feed you a cookie if you were naive enough to take it, but you didn’t have to accept it. You could still browse, add items to and remove items from your shopping cart, checkout, pay, and do anything else you wanted to do without any cookies at all. That was a very important characteristic given Amazon’s penchant for tracking users and data mining.

The Amazon site wasn’t completely RESTful–without a lot of JavaScript I don’t think any consumer site could be given both the browser vendors’ and the W3C’s failure to implement simple features like HTTP logout and forms that PUT and DELETE–but it did better than most.

However about a week or two ago something changed, and it now seems impossible to do more than browse without accepting their nutrition-free cookies. They seem to be going through a site-wide redesign. This is a definite step backwards. Given that they were already maintaining sessions (without cookies) before, I’m not sure if this will have a negative impact on their scalability. Nonetheless, it’s disappointing.

2 Responses to “Amazon Breaks Their Site”

  1. The Puget News: Amazon’s Navigational Redesign: What People are Sayin’! (a meta-post) Says:

    […] Mokka Mit Schlag: “However about a week or two ago something changed, and it now seems impossible to do more than browse without accepting their nutrition-free cookies. They seem to be going through a site-wide redesign. This is a definite step backwards. Given that they were already managing sessions (without cookies) before I’m not sure if this will have a negative impact on their scalability. Nonetheless, it’s disappointing.” […]

  2. Erich Says:

    I’m betting that they surveyed their customers and came to the conclusion that, statistically speaking, everybody accepts cookies. Those that don’t are a rounding error. My guess…

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