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Title

Amazon Store: Usability

Description

After having listened to an excellent interview with the author on <a href="https://thisishell.com/interviews/1059-mithu-sanyal">What we don't talk about when we talk about rape</a>, I'd recently added the book <i>Rape: From Lucretia to #MeToo</i> by <i>Mithu Sanyal</i> to my Amazon Wishlist. Soon after, I received an e-mail from Amazon that they were giving me a one-week, five-dollar coupon toward the purchase of the book. That sounded good to me. I clicked through to the book's page, where I saw that, indeed, a five-dollar credit would be applied were I to purchase the book. <img src="{att_link}screen_shot_2019-06-29_at_21.04.26.png" href="{att_link}screen_shot_2019-06-29_at_21.04.26.png" align="none" caption="Initial Offer" scale="25%"> However, when I elected to "Buy now with 1-Click", I landed on an order-summary page that showed a different coupon for $3.04 had been applied, but that my original $5 coupon was missing. <img src="{att_link}screen_shot_2019-06-29_at_21.04.17.png" href="{att_link}screen_shot_2019-06-29_at_21.04.17.png" align="none" caption="'Place Order' Screen" scale="25%"> I thought maybe it had something to do with 1-click, so I turned that off in the settings. FYI: you can't disable 1-click purchasing on Amazon. There's an <i>option</i> to disable it, but it doesn't actually disable anything. But I digress, because that's a whole other usability/false-advertising problem. Since it was only a matter of a few bucks, I took the chance that Amazon's site was just incapable of displaying a one-time-only coupon as well as a previous credit. I could hide the old credit, but couldn't get it to show me the coupon. I placed my order and was greeted with the following order summary. <img src="{att_link}screen_shot_2019-06-29_at_21.05.33.png" href="{att_link}screen_shot_2019-06-29_at_21.05.33.png" align="none" caption="'Order Summary' Page" scale="25%"> Both credits had been applied on the final order, which is good. That a site that handles over 50% of America's (and probably much of the West's) purchases doesn't have a portal that can display the details of slightly more-complicated orders is not.