When you’re shopping on Amazon, it’s easy to get distracted by all the ads and suggestions the site makes. In fact, you may be so distracted that you end up forgetting what you visited on the site to buy.
For example, if I go to the Amazon home page right now, the site suggests that I buy a fire stick (only $ 39.99!) And I flipped the travel power adapter that I saw yesterday, but did not buy. The more I move down, the more “picks” Amazon has to buy.
Amazon Lite is a Chrome extension that removes all ads, sponsored products and site clutter, allowing you to make a straight line to what actually came to the site to buy.
With the extension active, the home page looks like a Google search bar. Write 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 the actual product pages.
The site, especially the home page, looks pretty empty with all those things gone. Here is the look of a USB-C cable search with the extension running:
And this is what it looks like with this off:
It has to go through three sponsored lists and a huge carousel of suggestions of “Best qualified of our brands” before it can even access the regular lists with the regular version of the site. It is not ideal.
You can set the extension to be enabled by default all the time, or customize it so that it only loads the optimized site by clicking on the extension’s icon. I went with the second option, simply because sometimes I really like to see Amazon’s suggestions.
That said, the extension can handle much more than a traditional ad blocker and can make Amazon purchases much less crowded.