The $500M Lesson from Amazon’s Homepage Redesign | Rahul Chaudhari (ex-Amazon, Kohl’s)
Rahul Chaudhari breaks down how Amazon reclaimed 41% wasted impressions by redesigning their homepage, the third-most visited digital site in the world.
How do you redesign the most visited e-commerce webpage in the world? Rahul Chaudhari helped reshape the Amazon homepage during his years as a product leader there, before becoming VP of Product and Technology at Kohl’s.
In this episode, Rahul shares:
Amazon’s “customer backwards” approach - and how he used it to unlock half a billion dollars of value on the Amazon homepage
The secret to product adoption: leverage existing customer habits to unlock new opportunities
And how Amazon and Google raised the bar for digital experiences so high that now every other product pays the price
1. Why customers expect Amazon-level experiences everywhere (05:10)
Rahul shared a simple but powerful insight:
“Why should I, as a consumer have different expectations from my digital banking or my insurance company or my fitness app, as compared to when I shop e-commerce.”
The bar doesn’t reset. If you force customers to relearn workflows and build different habits than they’re used to, that adds a tremendous amount of friction to their digital experience.
Takeaway:
Your competitors aren’t just in your category. They’re every great digital experience your customer has had this week.
2. Why “customer backwards” beats “solution forward” (8:40)
Rahul explains the difference:
“Customer backwards really is you start from the customer and then work backwards of that for anything that you wanna solve for. Instead of saying, ‘Hey, I have an idea and I wanna do this’, which is solution forward.”
When teams start with a solution, they get attached to it. When they start with the customer, they stay solution-agnostic.
The Amazon homepage shift required rethinking eligibility, exposure limits, shared measurement, and governance — all focused on customer signals, not internal priorities.
Takeaway:
If you’re optimizing surfaces around what your company wants users to do (instead of what users actually signal they want), you’re already creating friction.
3. How Amazon reclaimed 41% wasted impressions (12:20)
Rahul’s team at Amazon discovered that overexposure was killing impact.
“We reclaimed some 41% impressions that were wasted because of over exposure that led to, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars of incremental business impact for all of these programs.”
Different Amazon programs were optimizing for their own metrics — Prime subscriptions, Alexa units, Grocery adoption — but without shared guardrails.
The team introduced:
Common measurement across perception, habit, and economic impact
Exposure caps to prevent “hero blindness”
Governance to prevent any single team from monopolizing the placement
They also focused on adoption — not just first clicks.
“What we care about is not the one first action. First Action is great. But what we care about is, does that get you enough into being engaged with that program so that you’re adopted.”
Takeaway:
Define adoption precisely. If you only measure the first click, you’ll optimize for false positives and waste resources chasing short-term wins.
4. AI doesn’t change the problem — it changes the business model (19:10)
Rahul’s biggest AI insight wasn’t about tools — it was about business design.
Instead of asking “What AI tool should we buy?”, Rahul suggests asking how your business model changes in an AI world.
He also warns that AI needs structure before it needs models. If your data is scattered across systems without shared schemas, ontologies, and relationships, you don’t have an AI strategy — you have translation debt.
And as agentic shopping rises? The homepage may no longer be your homepage.
Takeaway:
AI isn’t about bolting on features. It’s about rethinking value creation and data foundations.
Links
Chapters
00:00 Introduction
01:38 Rahul’s journey from marketing to product
07:41 Why you shouldn't aim to re-educate users after they've already developed shopping habits
09:13 Redesigning the Amazon homepage: The ‘customer backwards’ approach
21:00 How AI will change retail business models
24:46 Agentic commerce & what happens when ChatGPT becomes the homepage?
29:07 AI needs containers, not just models
37:02 Conclusion
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