4 ms·

Sounds like a niche case. For average people who buy one book at a time, Amazon's purchase process is single-click. All of the Kindle books I've gotten in rec

Sounds like a niche case. For average people who buy one book at a time, Amazon's purchase process is single-click. All of the Kindle books I've gotten in recent memory have been DRM-free. I'm having trouble feeling any outrage here, I think most retailers would have flagged your account if you used a bunch of different credit cards, one for each item you bought.

jacquesm 4y ago
Average people like me, who visit a bookstore once in six months or so tend to stock up on books. Never had a bookstore bar me from entering because I bought too many books. On the contrary, they asked me if they could help out by delivering them to my house for free...
- SalimoS 4y ago
  To be completely fair if you use a new card for every book it will rise some eyebrows
  - nimih 4y ago
    Yeah, the human being behind the counter will probably ask "why the hell are you ringing up each book on a new credit card," to which the OP would presumably answer "I'm buying books for work and this is how they make me do expense reports," and both would continue to go about their day. Perhaps part of the OP's point is that the efficiency gains of Amazon over B&M retailers (from the POV of the company owners and investors, at least) come at a very real cost to the customer experience.
    - rootusrootus 4y ago
      When I was younger, in my teens and early 20s, carding was a thing. Good old stolen credit cards used in person at retail. This was in the late 80s, before the Internet became A Thing. If you had walked into a store and started swiping multiple cards, they'd most likely have called the cops.
      - School-Cotton 4y ago
        Even if they all had the same name?
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  This reminds me of the back and forth discussion on EVs vs ICEVs. Yes, if your use case requires you to go to a remote location to buy the product, your purchase pattern is going to reflect that. You refuel your car once a week or so, I refuel every single night. You go buy multiple books at a time at a bookstore, I buy them on the fly at the moment I want them.
lucb1e 4y ago
Since chargebacks due to fraud costs the retailer extra (thus they must do fraud checking and magic heuristics) as far as I understand, does that make it the credit card system's fault? Using a ton of different cards indeed would sound like a database leak to me, so with the retailer being liable for the user's and/or bank's failure to design a system under which the user can keep their credentials secure, this behavior being not allowed is understandable. This is all relatively foreign to me as a European who just pays with iDeal (Dutch system) that doesn't know fraud chargebacks or anything, and where it's on the banks (rather than retailers) to refund fraud from e.g. phishing so it's in their own interest to design a secure system, so correct me if I misunderstood something about how credit cards work.
bambax 4y ago
Kindle purchase on Amazon is sub-par. The "single click" is in fact super annoying in my use case. I have an account with Amazon, with two different cards, one for professional purchases and one for personal ones[0]. When I buy a physical thing I can choose the card when paying. But for Kindles that's not possible, so I have to change the default card before buy. Very annoyging. Also, for some reason, as described by the OP, one can't add a Kindle book to any cart to buy more than one at a time... or even save it for later! Which is completely absurd and user hostile. [0] It's also possible to have two different accounts, but that comes with different problems; I have a pro account with Amazon but never use it.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  I agree, niche cases are niche, and when the experience is optimized for Joe Average then your niche case may very well become less convenient.
- themadturk 4y ago
  This is me at Christmas. I got a ton of Amazon gift cards and spent them all on Kindle books the same day, because it's a hassle changing my default payment method to ignore cards. Don't want to spend my Christmas money on the next Amazon subscription shipment of Kind Bars, toothpaste and Kickstarts!
helloworld11 4y ago
Try buying ebooks on Amazon for kindle app from another country (in my case Latin America), they essentially force you to get the book under their kindle unlimited crap and there's no easy way to remove its DRMif you buy it like that. Because I emphatically do remove DRM from ebooks I buy (they're mine now, I "bought" them, no?), this makes it a no-go.

jacquesm 4y ago

Average people like me, who visit a bookstore once in six months or so tend to stock up on books. Never had a bookstore bar me from entering because I bought too many books. On the contrary, they asked me if they could help out by delivering them to my house for free...

SalimoS 4y ago
To be completely fair if you use a new card for every book it will rise some eyebrows
- nimih 4y ago
  Yeah, the human being behind the counter will probably ask "why the hell are you ringing up each book on a new credit card," to which the OP would presumably answer "I'm buying books for work and this is how they make me do expense reports," and both would continue to go about their day. Perhaps part of the OP's point is that the efficiency gains of Amazon over B&M retailers (from the POV of the company owners and investors, at least) come at a very real cost to the customer experience.
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    When I was younger, in my teens and early 20s, carding was a thing. Good old stolen credit cards used in person at retail. This was in the late 80s, before the Internet became A Thing. If you had walked into a store and started swiping multiple cards, they'd most likely have called the cops.
    - School-Cotton 4y ago
      Even if they all had the same name?
rootusrootus 4y ago
This reminds me of the back and forth discussion on EVs vs ICEVs. Yes, if your use case requires you to go to a remote location to buy the product, your purchase pattern is going to reflect that. You refuel your car once a week or so, I refuel every single night. You go buy multiple books at a time at a bookstore, I buy them on the fly at the moment I want them.

lucb1e 4y ago

Since chargebacks due to fraud costs the retailer extra (thus they must do fraud checking and magic heuristics) as far as I understand, does that make it the credit card system's fault? Using a ton of different cards indeed would sound like a database leak to me, so with the retailer being liable for the user's and/or bank's failure to design a system under which the user can keep their credentials secure, this behavior being not allowed is understandable. This is all relatively foreign to me as a European who just pays with iDeal (Dutch system) that doesn't know fraud chargebacks or anything, and where it's on the banks (rather than retailers) to refund fraud from e.g. phishing so it's in their own interest to design a secure system, so correct me if I misunderstood something about how credit cards work.

bambax 4y ago

Kindle purchase on Amazon is sub-par. The "single click" is in fact super annoying in my use case. I have an account with Amazon, with two different cards, one for professional purchases and one for personal ones[0]. When I buy a physical thing I can choose the card when paying. But for Kindles that's not possible, so I have to change the default card before buy. Very annoyging. Also, for some reason, as described by the OP, one can't add a Kindle book to any cart to buy more than one at a time... or even save it for later! Which is completely absurd and user hostile. [0] It's also possible to have two different accounts, but that comes with different problems; I have a pro account with Amazon but never use it.

rootusrootus 4y ago
I agree, niche cases are niche, and when the experience is optimized for Joe Average then your niche case may very well become less convenient.
themadturk 4y ago
This is me at Christmas. I got a ton of Amazon gift cards and spent them all on Kindle books the same day, because it's a hassle changing my default payment method to ignore cards. Don't want to spend my Christmas money on the next Amazon subscription shipment of Kind Bars, toothpaste and Kickstarts!

helloworld11 4y ago

Try buying ebooks on Amazon for kindle app from another country (in my case Latin America), they essentially force you to get the book under their kindle unlimited crap and there's no easy way to remove its DRMif you buy it like that. Because I emphatically do remove DRM from ebooks I buy (they're mine now, I "bought" them, no?), this makes it a no-go.