2006.09.23
Multiple Amazon.ca accounts (or, how not to build a web application)
Don’t get me wrong – I love Amazon as much as the rest of us, and I order both music and books from Amazon on a fairly regular basis. However I was a little disturbed to discover that I actually have two Amazon accounts now.
Let me explain. Once upon a time I was a University student and I used my university e-mail address to create an account on Amazon.ca. Fast forward a few years to when I acquired the wittevrongel.ca domain, I created a new amazon account with my new e-mail address. OK, so I now have two Amazon accounts. No big deal, right?
But somewhere along the line, I updated my old Amazon account to have the new e-mail address. So now I have two Amazon accounts with the same e-mail address. They differ only by password. I’m a little surprised that this is even possible. The two accounts have seperate order histories, seperate shopping carts, and all the rest of it. This confused the heck out of me, since one of my recent orders didn’t show up where I was expecting it to.
I called Amazon to find out what was going on, and they explained that I now have two accounts with the same e-mail address. Worse yet, there’s no way I can merge the two accounts into one. I have to dump one or the other.
As a software developer, I’ve written my share of web applications. I’m not going to claim to be a web application guru by any means, but it strikes me as odd that you can have what amounts to two accounts with the same login on a web site. The software should never have allowed me to change my old e-mail address to the new one when another account with the same e-mail already existed in the system. Or, it should have offered to merge the two accounts (which turns out to be impossible). Now I’ll forever have to be careful about which password I use when using Amazon.ca, or ask Amazon to delete one of the accounts (the one without pending orders, I suppose).
Part of me is curious as to exactly how long I’ve had the two accounts. I’ve been lucky until now in that all of my orders save the most recent one (now two) were from the same account, but I suspect I’ve had both accounts for quite some time now (probably years).
Oh well. I guess this is a lesson learned in application design for me – thou shalt not allow what amounts to duplicate usernames. I only wish Amazon learned that lesson before I got myself into this mess.
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