The main area I have complaint with is the discovery process for finding digital videos to watch. Once you've used something like Netflix, the Amazon process is awful.

Oh, good point, this is definitely true. I have Prime, but Netflix is so much easier to find stuff on (or even remember that there's stuff there to find) that I've never used any of the included free Amazon video stuff.

I buy a fair bit of stuff from Amazon, but it's hard for me to spend more than 10 minutes on the site without wanting to punch the monitor. Now, don't get me wrong. I love the attention to detail in every other part of their business. It's just their website (and similar things, like the abysmal Amazon MP3 app for Android) that are the problem.

I hate that I need to log in 3 times within the space of 5 minutes as I hit different parts of the site that apparently are considered more and more sensitive.

I hate the way they keep on misleadingly suggesting that items might be eligible for free shipping when they aren't (every possible signal from the user profile to ip geo-location should be indicating that I'm the wrong country for that).

I despise the way they keep on defaulting me back to paying in the wrong currency with their rip-off "amazon currency converter" with worse exchange rates than my credit card.

I can't believe that in this day and age they aren't able to synchronize anything except the most rudimentary profile data across their different domains. So the US site will keep on recommending a DVD I've already bought off the UK site, and the UK one will nag me about rating a book that I've already rated on the US one.

That's just a few things off the top off my head, not some long held grudge list.

It's difficult to comparison-shop for features; Amazon reviews are now the definitive source of consumer opinion, but you have to sort of agglomerate your own set of W-X, X-Y, Y-Z and X-Z comparisons to see why people chose one over the other (and account for the fact that all four of those reviews were on models that have since been replaced).

That's true in many ways. The actual site's UX isn't bad per se because it's pretty easy to find what you want, buy it, manage the order, etc. And yes, that's what "it's all about" at the end of the day.

I think I was caught in a little bit of Silicon Valley myopic thinking since their site isn't shiny and that's what is mistakenly considered as interchangeable with good UI design these days. That being said, Amazon.com the site does still need to improve UX in a couple key areas. Compared to more contemporary e-commerce sites, the ability to compare items and make sense of ratings (i.e. the flaws of the 5 star rating system) is where they need to make the most improvement IMHO.

It may have been an overstatement to say "their site leaves much to be desired" in all fairness.

It seems like there are easy improvements to search by ratings they could make. If I am browsing for a new book, I'd like to be able to search by number of reviews alone. Anything with more than 500 or so reviews is probably worth taking a look at. I also would like to filter out items with less than 'x' reviews or search by a ratio of number of reviews to the number of stars. This might hurt products trying to get off the ground, but I'd really like it as a user.