Why You Should Be Using ‘Amazon Lite’

When you’re shopping on Amazon, it’s easy to get distracted by all of the ads and suggestions the site makes. You might get so distracted, in fact, that you end up forgetting what you went to the site to shop for in the first place.

For instance, if I go to Amazon’s homepage right now the site suggests I purchase a fire tv stick and throws the travel power adaptor in my face that I looked at yesterday, but didn’t purchase. The further I scroll down, the more “picks” Amazon has for me to buy.

[referenced url=”https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2018/12/amazon-primes-promise-of-two-day-delivery-is-dying/” thumb=”https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/t_ku-large/bexhhgwxnr4vtckpi2gw.jpg” title=”Amazon Prime’s Promise Of Two-Day Delivery Is Dying” excerpt=”Having a baby in 2018, as my wife and I just did, means becoming an Amazon household. We’re not proud of this. We know that Amazon treats its workers terribly. We know that the company has extorted billions of taxpayer dollars out of our home city of New York in exchange for turning our neighbours into terribly treated employees. But babies need a lot of stuff, and they need it quickly. Diapers on demand are a very tempting prospect.

So we bought our nappies on Amazon. And then they didn’t come when Amazon said they would come.”]

Amazon Lite is a Chrome extension that removes all of the ads, sponsored products and clutter from the site, allowing you to make a beeline to the thing you actually came to the site to buy.

With the extension active, the homepage looks sort of like a Google search bar. Type in what you’re looking for, and you’ll be taken to a search results page similar to what you might see without the extension — except now without all the ads and sponsored products in the mix. The same goes for actual product pages.

The site, especially the homepage, looks pretty bare with all that stuff gone. Here’s what a search for a USB-C cable looks like with the extension running:

And here’s what it looks like with it off:

You have to get through three sponsored listings and a huge carousel of “Top Rated from Our Brands” suggestions before you even get to the regular listings with the regular version of the site. Not ideal.

You can set the extension up so it’s on all the time by default, or customise it so it only loads the streamlined site when you click on the extension’s icon. I went with the second option, simply because sometimes I actually do like to see Amazon’s suggestions.

That said, the extension can take care of a lot more than a traditional ad blocker and can make shopping on Amazon a lot less cluttered.