You Are the Master of Your Account
Chapter 3: You Are the Master of Your Account
7. Click the Continue button.
You’re done! You’ll be offered the choice to start building your recommen- dations — giving Amazon.com some information about what you like and don’t like so they can suggest products — or to continue shopping. Either way, you’re armed to shop! The next time you visit the site, they’ll recog- nize you (assuming your cookies are enabled); should you decide to buy, they ask you to sign in with your e-mail address and your password.
Before you give out even the smallest bit of information, you should be aware of the privacy policies of the company you’re dealing with. Amazon has a good history of protecting their customers’ privacy. I cover their privacy policy in more detail in Chapter 4, but the nutshell version is that they don’t sell infor- mation and only share it with affiliates and subsidiaries when necessary. You can access their privacy policy in full from any page on the site. Just scroll to the bottom of the page and click the Privacy Notice link in the footer.
Passwords
A good password is like a good car. It keeps you safe, it keeps you moving, and it makes for a good trip. That said, make sure you pick a good password — something you’ll remember that’s also very difficult for someone else to guess.
Your birthdate, your middle name, your dog’s name . . . notgood choices.
Think 007 here. When it comes to passwords, you want to be mysterious.
Here are a few suggestions for better password picking:
Combine numbers and letters.This is the easiest way to make your password mysterious.
Don’t choose anything that can be pulled straight from your driver’s license.
Try nonsense.Though it’s more difficult for you to remember if it has no significance, a nonsensical password is virtually uncrackable! A good way to create a “nonsense” password is to think of a sentence you’ll remember — like “I am a supermodel” — then use the first letter of each of the words: “iaas,” in this case.
Cookies . . . No Milk
Some cookies are yummy. Web cookies are not, but they can provide some tasty perks when shopping at Amazon. A cookieis a small file that lives on your computer’s hard drive. You don’t put it there yourself. Web sites such as Amazon.com
put cookies on your computer through your browser. Don’t worry. There’s nothing sinister about it. They just want to be able to recognize you and track your shopping history so they can make your customer experience better.
10-4, good buddy — signing out
Knowing how to sign out is equally as important (and not nearly as intuitive) as signing in. If you’re shopping at Amazon from an Internet café, a university computer lab, a public library, or any other place where privacy isn’t a guar- antee, you need to sign out. Amazon will “time out” on any session after a few minutes of inactivity, but if you don’t sign out yourself, you’ve just given the next lucky user a window of opportunity to access your account. For all you know they’ll buy $1,500 worth of Barney videos and completely destroy your recommendations (those nifty product suggestions that Amazon makes based on what you like and don’t like). So sign out!
1. Point your Web browser to www.amazon.com. The Amazon.com home page appears.
2. Click the link at the top of the home page that reads, “If you’re not so and so, click here.”
3. Choose the No, I Am a New Customer option and click the Sign In button — no need to enter your e-mail address.
Voilà! The Amazon.com site is primed for a new customer — which means you’re signed out! Your personal info is safe and your recommen- dations will remain Barney-free.
Where’s My Stuff?
Imagine this: You’ve placed an order at Amazon.com and suddenly you realize that you’re going to be visiting your sister in Texas the week your package is scheduled to arrive. Or how about this: Your friend has a birthday coming up and you decide to get him the latest Hootie CD but the birthday is right around the corner — and the CD isn’t. What do you do? You go to Your Account (see Figure 3-4). Just click the Your Account button in the Shopping Tools menu to get there. Within Your Account there’s a section called (fittingly enough)
“Where’s My Stuff?” and the answers to all your order-related questions are in there.
Here are some of the key things you can do in Where’s My Stuff?:
View your complete order history Track specific orders
Cancel existing orders
Change your shipping and billing information Combine orders
Make returns
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Chapter 3: You Are the Master of Your Account
Tracking packages
If you simply want to find your order and know where it is in the pipeline, all you have to do is click the Track Packages link in the Where’s My Stuff? sec- tion of Your Account. When you do, you’re taken to your Open and Recently Shipped Orders page, which will look something like Figure 3-5.
At first glance you can tell whether the order is open or completed. You can also view the shipping status and estimated delivery date. If you want more specific Figure 3-5:
A standard Open and Recently Shipped Orders page.
Figure 3-4:
The Your Account page.
shipping information, click the View or Change Order button by the item you’re interested in and you’ll be taken to that item’s order summary page.
Ch-ch-ch-changes: Managing your order
Let’s say you want to cancel an order, change the gift message, combine two orders, or change your shipping information. You can accomplish all those tasks and more by first going to your Open and Recently Shipped Order page.
Here’s a little secret: Of the twelve links offered in the Where’s My Stuff? sec- tion of Your Account, eight take you directly to the Open and Recently Shipped Orders page. The only thing that changes from link to link is the introductory paragraph. The content of the page stays the same (and so does what you can do there), regardless of how you get there.
Once you’re there, you simply find the order you want to change and then click the View or Change Order button to go to that item’s order summary.
The Order summary page is where the real magic happens.
Figure 3-6 is a basic Order Summary page. If you click the appropriate button, you can do several handy tricks:
Cancel an order or change quantities Change your shipping address Change your shipping speed Change your gift options Change your payment method Change your billing address Print an invoice
Use a gift certificate or promotional code
All these activities are relatively self-explanatory, but there are two caveats:
You can’t make changes to an order that’s already entered the shipping process.
When you buy from some of Amazon’s smaller partners — like certain zShops and Marketplace sellers — you have fewer order-management options. Instead of changes being just a click or two away, you’ll likely have to deal with that vendor directly. And here’s the tricky part. It’s not always obvious that you’re buying from a partner. When Amazon culls search results for you or puts together a subcategory page, it pulls prod- ucts from all parts of the store to offer the widest selection possible. So you have to pay attention to the Item Information in the left column of the item’s detail page to find out whether you’re dealing with a small partner or with Amazon directly.
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Chapter 3: You Are the Master of Your Account
Getting Personal
Unlike its brick-and-mortar counterparts, Amazon.com offers special shop- ping perks to the masses. But instead of having a well-coifed aide to help you find the ideal item, Amazon makes you your own personal shopper.
Figure 3-6:
You can make changes to existing orders from the Order Summary page.