Amazon has the reputation of a reliable e-commerce platform with adequate variety to choose from across different product categories. Neat categorization for millions of products and listing help make Amazon one of thebest shopping apps on Android, but navigating through its labyrinthine menus to shop by category can get cumbersome, as a result. More often than not, we use the prominent search bar at the top of the app and website to find products quickly. However, this saving grace also lost its appeal on desktop because it pretends like the left and right arrow keys don’t exist on your keyboard.
I’ve been writing for a few years now, and I’ve noticed that it’s much quicker to move the cursor around in a text field with keyboard shortcuts, instead of lifting my hand and using the mouse. Using a combination of Ctrl, Shift, and the arrow keys has become second nature, and I tend to use the shortcuts in nearly every text field I encounter. I made a typo in Amazon’s search bar on the web recently, only to realize the website doesn’t allow you to use the left and right arrow keys to move the cursor anymore.
The Android Police team noticed this behavior on the Amazon website for Germany, India, and the US. It is noticeable on Chrome and Safari, the former running on both Windows and Mac. This suggests the issue is widespread and probably noticeable worldwide, although we aren’t seeing any reports from frustrated shoppers in the wild, yet.
The inability to move your cursor using arrow keys may seem trivial, but imagine spelling “Samsung” wrong in a search for “Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5 1TB,” or imagine you wanted to search forZ Flip 5instead. Without the ability to reposition the cursor using Ctrl + Left arrow a few times, you may have to pick one of Amazon’s auto-complete suggestions from the drop-down, or mash Backspace through it all and type many words again. Yes, you could use a mouse pointer and click the mistake to fix it, or double-click to select the whole word — that still works — but it costs your precious time to refine searches or fix spelling errors.
Weirdly enough, Amazon selectively ignores the existence of the left and right arrow keys, but allows me to pick an auto-complete suggestion using the up/down arrows. Picking one of the auto-complete prompts is easy enough, which is perhaps what Amazon wants me to do more of. This could be a bug, and not deliberate, user-hostile behavior, but one could say that recommendations I wasn’t exactly looking for could steer my purchase decisions if I’m unwilling to spend an additional moment to fix my search query.
Even if this is a bug, it significantly limits Amazon’s usability for people with accessibility concerns. At this point, you might have a similar error rate making purchases through the Alexa voice assistant. However, we sincerely hope Amazon brings back support for all four arrow keys on a keyboard, because the inability to use your left/right arrows in the search field is limiting and infuriatingly detrimental to the overall user experience, just like thenew product rating display systemdeployed a couple of months ago.
