Amazon’s redesigned homepage will get you to buy more stuff

Amazon’s been testing a new design for its homepage for months, and it appears that the company opened it up to a broader group of users in the US today. Some of the changes include a flat dark bar that lines the top of the page, as well as a new dropdown menu that takes shoppers directly to Amazon’s Fire and Kindle products. The company has also managed to squeeze a lot more onto the page, whether you’re signed in or not. Otherwise, it’s mostly the same old Amazon, right down to product pages (which remain unchanged). Amazon’s been tweaking this design, and various other iterations going back to July, something Amazon told GeekWire was part of an ongoing test. It’s unclear just how wide the test is at this point, though a cursory check shows that Amazon continues to show the older variant on certain operating systems and browsers. Why any of this is remotely important is simple: a lot of people visit Amazon every day, and even small changes can have a dramatic impact on whether they end up buying something.