It’s remarkably similar to a mail I received a couple of weeks ago from a recruitment site, saying “here are the results of your saved search for Sales positions under £30,000″. Now it didn’t match any saved search I had, but it did make me log back on to the site and check (thus validating my login details, and bumping up their uniques for the month). Sneaky — so I unsubscribed soon after.

Jeremy, you are probably right! I do have rather a lot of stuff that comes via Amazon. I usually use it for all my Xmas shopping as well — saves me actually having to go into a shop!

Ryan, I don’t think this really counts as a usability problem: more a recommendations glitch. On the whole I rather like Amazon, even if the interface isn’t the best in the world. As I understand it, Amazon do a lot of A-B testing, so they are refining their design a lot based on performance, but dont revisit the original core design.

I think you could probably have a field day with Amazon or eBay, but I think the important thing is that they are usable enough that millions of people use them. So it might be better to focus on the learnability of the design — I think that is the key to their success.