Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Compare that with the traditional left-rail department list. Forget fat fingers—it’s often hard to hit the right selection the first time with a mouse, especially on a laptop or netbook screen. That’s the result of a decade of trying to pile more and more onto the screen that customers see when they first arrive at a site. The result is an incomprehensible jungle of sales pitches—and too much noise for any of them to sell effectively, even on a big screen.

There are plenty of reasons E-Commerce sites are laid out that way, one of the biggest being inertia. But there really was a time when underpowered PCs had a hard time supporting exotic features such as drop-down Web site menus. Clicking through to a new page took time a customer might not be willing to invest. Cramming the homepage with every possible link made sense in 1995, when the design factor was a 1024-by-768 PC screen driven by a dial-up modem.

Replacing that design factor with a broadband-driven tablet screen makes a lot of sense, even for retailers who aren’t trying to support sales and direct delivery of music, movies and e-books. Instead of thinking of a tablet as a smartphone on steroids, the tablet becomes the more portable baseline for PCs. If an E-Commerce site plays nicely on a tablet, it probably works well on a PC, too.

And while Amazon looks like it has pushed hardest toward the tablet, some other major E-tailers have adopted at least part of that tack. Target’s recently revamped site has a similarly open, tablet-friendly feel—although the homepage is so long that any tablet user will spend a long time working her way through the endless list of departments to get to the bottom of the page. The Macy’s and Nordstrom online stores also have more than the average amount of space between selections, which makes them easier to navigate on a tablet.

On the other hand, even E-tailers who have cleared away the jungle to let some light and air into their homepages still typically have a briar patch at the bottom of the page. Almost everyone still crams in too many informational links in too-tiny type at the bottom of their homepages—links for careers, investor relations, team member services, terms and conditions, and typically dozens of others. In 1995, PCs didn’t have the horsepower to fold these into drop-down menus. Today, any tablet can do that easily.

Let’s see if Amazon can convince the rest of E-tail to clean up that mess.