Amazon: 1-Stop, 1- Click Shopping

Everyone knows that Amazon is a great online bookseller.  Not everyone knows that Amazon is a great place to shop for other things like electronics, toys, kitchenware, software and more.  Some people know that Amazon has a patented (literally) a 1-click ordering system, but even those who know about the convenient 1-click option don’t use it as much as they could.

Why not?

Well, for one thing, there is that pesky shipping cost.  You'd think that would be an insurmountable problem for online sellers like Amazon, but apparently not.  Amazon has figured out to make 1-click ordering truly powerful; it’s called Amazon Prime.  This new service provides all-you-can-use shipping for $79 per year.  If you do most of your shopping online (and if you don’t you should), and if you use Amazon for much of it (and if you don’t you should now seriously consider doing so), then you can quickly order things without worrying about the shipping cost.  Two day shipping is free with Amazon Prime, and if you want it the next day you pay an extra $3.99.  Stop and think about that for a second or two and ponder what it means.

I have to admit that the full implications of this new offering didn’t hit me the first time I saw it advertised.  I thought to myself: well, okay, it’s nice but it’ll just make me order more books and things that I don’t need, so I’ll just hold off on signing up for Amazon Prime.  Then, I started to notice that there were all sorts of little things I actually needed around the house that I was having to drive around to get.  For example: replacement ink cartridges for my ink jet printer, blank CD’s, and, of course, food.

I immediately signed up for Amazon Prime, and now when I need something that's available at Amazon I fire up my browser, search for the item, and hit 1-click. Bada boom, bada bing!  In the space of a minute or two I’ve managed to take care of buying something that I need, but without having to fight weekend traffic gridlock.  And I don't have to pay sales tax (sorry local taxing officials!) so the more I use my ‘all-you-can-eat’ shipping to buy things that I’d otherwise get at a local store the more money I'll save.

Money savings are nice, but the thing I’m really happy to save is time and irritation.  Everyone talks about how the web is amazing because you can make information come to you.  Information?  What about 3-dimensional household objects?  Hey look ma! I'm using the Internet I can make those come to me easily too.  And no shipping charges?  Woohoo!  I’m so there.

Why you would want to buy anything from a physical store that you can get  from Amazon (or some other online merchant) is an incomprehensible mystery.   Actually, there is one thing that I always worried about when I ordered things from online merchants: what happens if I have to return the item?  It’s not that I didn’t think there was a way to do it, but I didn’t know what was involved and I assumed it would be unpleasant--just like in the physical world, where you have to stand in line at a special corner of the store with disgruntled shoppers, and where you have to prove to a disgruntled worker when and where you bought the item.  Let's face it: returning store-bought items is probably God's prototype for purgatory.  You know, painful enough but still in beta-testing.

Last Christmas, however, I had an online shopping epiphany.  I bought a $200 external hard drive for my Apple computer from Amazon.  I planned to use it to do routine backups, which are easy to do with an Apple computer.  When the hard drive showed up I tore open the package and pulled out the small hard drive and stuffed it in my computer bag.

Weeks passed. 

After the hectic holiday season was finally over I pulled the hard drive out and plugged it into the computer to do a backup.  Nothing happened.  Heavy sigh, followed by nervous eye-twitching.  The computer didn’t recognize the hard drive.  I spent the next few days trying to get the computer to talk to the hard drive, convinced that such a serious hardware failure was impossible with an Apple computer.  Eventually, I resigned myself to the notion that the hard drive was defective.  Or at least it was worth returning for a new one to see if the problem went away.

Alas, I had dispensed with the original packaging, and the receipt that came with it.  I was certain that this would make returning the item even more difficult, but I fired up the Amazon site just to see what the protocol would be.

Turned out it was ridiculously easy and painless.  I navigated to the bottom of the main page where I spotted a link that said ‘Your Account’ and clicked on it.  Then I was presented with a list of choices, one of which said ‘Return Items.’  The next page offered me some choices, one of which was to sell the item if I had held it beyond the return date.  Tempting, but not a good choice for an item that  didn’t work.  I clicked on the button for ‘I bought it and want to return it’ and was asked to login with my password (nice security feature) and was taken to a page that listed my ‘recent orders.’

I selected the hard drive order, answered a few quick questions about why I was returning it and then was told to await a magic email from Amazon.  The E-mail arrived in a few minutes and had a link to a printout of a UPS package label.  I was told to take the label and the item to a UPS store (there is one conveniently located on the bottom floor of my office building) and they would take care of the rest.  And so bopped downstairs and handed the non-disgruntled salesperson my stuff.  Once they had entered the package into their system, Amazon shipped me a new hard drive and said it would arrive in two days, which it did.  They told me that if my shipment to them didn’t contain a hard drive they’d bill my credit card for the new one they were shipping me, which made sense.

Anyway, two days later I had my new hard drive and it worked perfectly.  What would have been a major hassle was only a minor inconvenience, but only because I had bought the hard drive at Amazon as opposed to the local Best Buy or whatever.  There are a lot of great things about using my browser to shop at Amazon.  Certainly not having to search for parking places is right up there at the top of list, as is saving money.

Still, there is one thing that bums me out about Amazon.  I wish they'd figure out a way to sell groceries online.  Maybe one day they'll figure that one out too.