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Amazon, inexplicably hampering its most loyal customers

[Note:  Links below are affiliate links, so if you click and buy, I make money.]

I have bought hundreds of items from Amazon  (yes, I’m an Amazon Prime member, surprise surprise :-P)

Some of them I’m particularly fond of and want to either repurchase or recommend to a friend… but I can’t do easily because Amazon won’t help me.  You see, I’ve not been able to figure out any way to search through my purchases; it seems I can only browse by year (and paginatedly browse at that… ack!). 

I bought an amazing compressible travel pillow (below) a while back that I absolutely love, and I wanted to encourage my parents to get it for their upcoming trip to New Zealand :

[oops, pillow seems to no longer be listed on Amazon, and graphic was just showing a generic Amazon ad.  Blech!]

…but couldn’t find any sane way to look up the product. 
– I tried doing an Amazon search for “travel pillow” but there are hundreds if not thousands of travel pillows in their store.
– I then tried searching through my gmail (where I get my Amazon order receipts) for “travel pillow” but that didn’t turn it up.
– Somewhat randomly, I then searched Amazon for “orange travel pillow” and that did the trick.

Amazon, why do you make this so difficult for your active customers?  Why not a simple search box in the My Orders screen?

Edited on November 8, 2009 to add:
Looks like Amazon no longer sells this pillow.  Bummer!

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Adam Lasnik

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12 responses to “Amazon, inexplicably hampering its most loyal customers”

  1. Henry Work Avatar
    Henry Work

    Great point, Adam.  Recently, I’ve been thinking about the possibilities of Amazon integrating FB Connect—this would be a good step in that direction.  More about you, and what you’ve purchased, and your friends, and what their purchasing histories.

    Reply
  2. Adam Avatar
    Adam

    Hmm… I hadn’t thought about the social aspect!  In that direction, Amazon could give you the option to share your wishlist with friends, so that when you were struggling to figure out what to buy them for their birthday, voila 😀

    Reply
  3. Laura Avatar
    Laura

    That’s Amazon for you Adam! With any luck someone from Amazon will read your post and get to work on it!

    Reply
  4. Mary Anne Avatar
    Mary Anne

    &_& I’ve never even thought about that – it would be a good feature to have.  Why don’t you start some kind of “drive” to have them do that?

    Reply
  5. marius Avatar
    marius

    maybe they didn’t expect your situation though is a very common one. Amazon fail 🙂

    Reply
  6. Pia Avatar
    Pia

    Thats also a reason why amazon sometimes fucked me up 😀
    but the programmer arent so hurry in good ideas.
    how long does we wait for that application?!

    Reply
  7. Florian Avatar
    Florian

    Hi Adam, you should have an email confirmation for each Amazon order, right? So you could search your emails for [Amazon pillow] or the like.

    Reply
  8. MyStar Avatar
    MyStar

    This is definitely something you should communicate with Amazon! I experienced the exact same issues and searching through your e-mail like Florian suggesteds here isn’t really that user friendly. And adding the social aspect (sharing lists with each other) seems to be great. Maybe Amazon can get people to spread their lists via Twitter having other to buy the same products (“Look at my bizar christmas wish list”) this could end up in a lot more sales for Amazon.

    Reply
  9. Calvin Avatar
    Calvin

    I didn’t quite believe it, at first. So I logged into my Amazon account to check it out. You are right – there is no search box for previous orders. There is only a drop down list for you to choose to browse your previous orders by year. In my case, this didn’t even work. None of my previous book orders/purchases showed up!

    Reply
  10. tptrillion Avatar
    tptrillion

    Waoh! quite funny to me. I thought you were the only person experiencing this. I logged into my Amazon account too, and found out the same in my account too.

    I just can’t seem to find search box for previous orders. Interesting enough. I don’t know why amazon is doing this anyway.

    Reply
  11. Fitouts Avatar
    Fitouts

    That goes to say that a lot of people/companies are selling through Amazon. I guess you really have to be more specific with your search to be able to find what you’re looking for.

    Reply
  12. Thomas Avatar
    Thomas

    You beat me to it, Adam. I was going to point out that sometimes the item goes out of market and is no longer sold. But you’re point was well made regarding being able to look up items one has bought in the past using Aamazon’s system. I like using Amazon also. Best of luck with this in the future.

    Reply

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