Amazon, why does your baby registry suck?
Dear Amazon,
Why does your baby registry suck? I’m mostly just curious, with a little bit of the disgruntled customer thrown in. For reasons that may go unsaid, I happened to be interacting with this product recently, and I simply could not get over how unsatisfactory the whole experience was. Normally, setting up a registry is just the type of the type of administrative task I detest; indeed, it was my dear husband who set up the registry in the first place and added the first batch of items (at your suggestion). When at last he figured out how to add me as a “co-registrant”, I decided to vet the site myself before sending it out to friends and family.
Boy! The whole experience, from adding items to seeing how the final result looked when sent to friends was confusing, soulless, and at times (dare I say?) in poor taste. Some of it was sloppiness (a big blank tile at the top of the externally facing page that must be a bug). Some of it was unintuitive and clunky (“where IS the share button?” — you know, the single most important thing about a registry). Some of it was just undelightful (“why can’t I do x,y, and z thing that I want to do?”).
I’ll send you a list of grievances if that would be helpful. I’ve never been a product manager, but I’ve spent the better part of my career interacting with them. I know enough to spot a subpar UX design when I see one. But rather than bore everyone else with the specific shortcomings (which extend, by the way, to the customer support experience when I tried to get some answers), I want to explore the simple question of: why?
Because, frankly, it doesn’t make sense to me. I would think that making your baby registry experience as sharp, intuitive, and delightful as possible would align very well with your bottom line. Get someone their first diapers, sippy cups, and booger suckers (of which you recommend 21 different kinds) on Amazon and they will likely buy their hundredth+ diaper, sippy cup and booger sucker on Amazon, right? Babies are big business, and this seems like an easy opportunity to prime (ahem) new parents to your services, especially when they aren’t the ones footing the bill. And yet…
So here are my working theories for why your baby registry sucks:
Theory #1: You don’t need to care
That is, you’re enjoying your e-commerce dominance and know that people will turn to you for their baby registry needs regardless of how much the experience sucks for them or their loved ones. However, Amazon isn’t actually the only baby registry game in town. There are lots of alternatives, both boutique and big box. There are even aggregators that will allow expecting parents to pick the perfect onesies and perfect pacifiers from their respective specialty sites if they wish.
Still, there is no doubt that Amazon remains top of mind when it comes to registries. It’s just so easy, for both expecting parents and Auntie Jane. It’s a known commodity, readily accessible, and connotes a feeling of frugality in an otherwise painfully expensive process.
Verdict: While not technically a monopoly in this space, Amazon is often likely the path of least resistance for many future parents, and this could contribute to a sense of complacency on the part of Amazon’s product team.
Theory #2: Baby registries aren’t actually predictive of someone’s lifetime Amazon spend on baby good and so it’s not worth your investment.
That is, in contrast to my earlier point in the introduction, even if your website sucks, people will still turn to you for all their future baby needs. Therefore, Amazon doesn’t need to invest a lot in this portion of the customer lifecycle because they know the value lies mostly elsewhere. In the industry, I believe this is called customer LTV (lifetime value). This seems quite plausible to me, especially considering that new parents are already likely deep within the Amazon ecosystem and won’t think twice about expanding that ecosystem to include baby items. Still, this seems like a missed opportunity given the inherent network effects of a registry: I send my registry out to potentially a few dozen family and friends and it could be a great opportunity to leverage that for business purposes (come to think of it, Amazon’s network effects are fairly weak across the board in this respect).
Verdict: I suspect this is part of the issue. This also could be an example of Amazon “shipping their org chart,” to use another industry phrase. The product managers in charge of diapers might have a great strategy and they’re driving tons of growth in their vertical. The product managers in charge of strollers might have a great strategy and they’re driving tons of growth in their vertical. There’s just no pressing need or obvious value to tie one to the other at this point.
Theory #3: This just isn’t your strong suit
We might chuckle at the thought of anything not being Amazon’s “strong suit.” But if you think about it, Amazon’s magic lies in the ability to fulfill your spontaneous wants and needs with remarkable efficiency. That’s not really at play with a baby registry. First of all, it’s a place where customers likely want to be very deliberate. They also probably have nine months to receive your items. There’s also a built-in social aspect to a registry that doesn’t jibe with Amazon’s sensibilities at all. You buy stuff on Amazon that you know you don’t need in part because no one need know about it — that signature box with the smile on it sitting on your stoop could contain anything. Registries, on the other hand, can be a source of anguish; how much do I feel comfortable asking my friends to spend on a bouncy thing my future child will likely just puke on? Will Grandma Mary balk at my request for organic bamboo diapers?
Further bolstering this theory are the things about its registry that Amazon does happen to do well: namely its algorithm spits out a myriad of recommendations for zillions of products you didn’t know you needed. Follow these recommendations at your peril, but it’s clear that this is a plug-and-play aspect of Amazon’s business model, with much less thought given to other parts of the product experience that are distinct to the registry use case.
Verdict: There may be something here, but it’s not an excuse for poor product design. I see this as an opportunity for Amazon to spread its wings a bit. Why not get some high-quality curation instead of just a flat list of your most popular versions of each item? Why not lean into the network effect and play with personal recommendations from someone’s trusted network?
Theory # 4: You just don’t care as much as you should about building great experiences for products whose users are expected to be almost exclusively female
Sigh. I didn’t want to go here. But it’s hard to ignore that for both wedding and baby registries, the registrants and the people purchasing from their registries are most likely to be female — probably by a wide margin. Do we not deserve smart, sophisticated product experiences too? Or at least something that doesn’t suck? Perhaps it’s not intentional, but I can easily imagine that the fact that this product is squarely in the female domain, when coupled with one or all of the other factors I mentioned above, makes this an “unsexy” product for talented young product managers looking to advance quickly in a hard-charging corporate environment like Amazon. Are baby registries really how you make your way to the top of the product and design heap? I suspect not. And if you’re not attracting the best talent to work on your product, that product will suffer. That’s too bad, because as I mentioned above, I think there is interesting product work to be done here (and this coming from someone whose registry creation was a much-procrastinated chore and avoids the “lifestyle” space in general).
Verdict: I think this is at play, under the surface. It’s probably not overt mismanagement and neglect so much as a lack of interest on the part of leadership to see the potential and invest appropriately. It’s a fixable problem. Make products with a strong female base cool to work on. Attract good, diverse talent. You’ll be more likely to end up with a product to be proud of.
