Online "Window Shopping" Anyone?

Amazon.com is a great website – I love it! Great products, at good prices. Having bought tons of things from it, it’s become one of my first stores for online shopping. Now here’s the issue – I never, that is until last week, gone on a shopping spree at Amazon. Unfortunately, I have realized with this Christmas shopping spree Amazon is not built for window shopping!!!

Here’s why (I hope someone from Amazon reads this!):

I am looking to buy something for Kutie – I don’t want to spend too much, but might consider buying a couple of items (more boxes under the tree) for him. I go to the toy department at Amazon. The big banner says “Deals” – Ok that’s good, it caught my eye and I go for it! Now here’s the problem. Sorting by age does not work! (Ok go ahead try it, I know you want to. Try Age 2 – 4 and you get a bunch of items that for “Recommended for 4 – 6 years”). I guess the engineer did not do a good job at filters. Of course its age 4 thats throwing it off, but come on I am sure there is some complex algorithm to fix it!

Another quibble, is the limited amount of pages that gets displayed, I cannot jump around! Maybe these are the effects of using Google for everything, but wish Amazon did the same. Only 3 pages displayed the first time, and then if you hit next its not 4, 5 & 6 but just 4!

Sorting by price may or may not work (I think I have figured out that it’s because of the category that you fall into). But when it works, it displays some crabby doll for $1 (this might be just me, but what do you do when genders dictate that I get cars for boys!); and when you want to move some pages ahead, you can’t – because it doesn’t display it!! Also, could you please tell me how many pages are there in all? I want to know ahead of time, if I need to go through 10 pages or 20 before I get to the last item!

Arrgh!

Of course, the argument against all of the above needed features is to give customers less options. But when filters are not working, and no end is in sight I would prefer to be given the choice of choices. Thank You!