I really try to buy things locally whenever reasonable. I'm willing to pay a fairly substantial premium to do so, because I like to support my town. That said, Amazon gets a lot of my business. They have a lot of things that it's hard to get locally, we have no local bookstores that I consistentlylike shopping with, and Amazon Prime makes it feel like there's never any shipping tax on my orders.
Today, I wanted to order some new hardware for doing SuperDuper! backups of our laptops. I had a $50 gift certificate, so I had to shop with Amazon (or, I think, a partner; it's hard to tell, but zShops at least were out). When I searched for things, I kept finding stuff listed at one price that then showed up at another when I clicked on the search result. Why? The search listed the cheapest price, but the main price listed on the item's page was the Amazon price. Now things got confusing: for me, the Amazon price was exact, as I would pay no shipping. For other vendors, I'd have to go figure out shipping. For yet others, I would not be able to use my gift certificate. Without the gift certificate, I'd be better off using Newegg, from whom I buy hardware most often.
Eventually I got things sorted: I ordered a hard drive enclosure from TigerDirect via Amazon with my certificate, but had to pay shipping. That left me with about seven dollars on the certificate, so I looked into getting some cables I needed. All the search results were coming up showing a few bucks, but the Amazon item price would be $20.
I really want to do business with Amazon, not their little remoras. While I like the fact that those symbiotic partner stores are there for me, sometimes I just want to force the Amazon product search engine to only show me "from Amazon" results.
It's a shame that I do not really have All My Email Ever. I would have my original receipt for my first few Amazon purchases, with the ancient logo and everything. I think I ordered them with the Lynx browser. At least I can pull up the records of the order. Chip might be proud: Slack!
Thank you for writing to Amazon.com with your comments about search for only marketplace item. At present we do not have a facility to to search for marketplace items.
I will be sure to pass your message on to the appropriate department...blah..blah..blah
Hmm... Oh well. There are actually a lot of things I don't like about Amazon and often think I should order stuff from Buy.com instead. But somehow I always end up on Amazon.
I pre-ordered a copy of "The Salmon of Doubt" from Amazon, I guess it was during their first year of business. Even though the order was never processed since the original book was never released, Amazon sent me a mouse pad as one of their first customers on some anniversiary. It had some quote about "Inside of a dog it is too dark to read".
