Ask HN: Why does Amazon allow multiple accounts with the same email address?

5 points by dancryer 12 years ago | 6 comments

We noticed a few days ago that my girlfriend has two accounts on Amazon (UK - not sure if that makes a difference,) each of which can be logged into with the same email address. The only differentiator at login time is the different password used to log into each account.<p>If she enters one password, she logs into her older account with her old address. With a different password, she logs into her newer account with our newer address, a Prime account.<p>There's no information shared between the accounts, the order histories, names, addresses and so on are all separate.

dalke 12 years ago |

As I recall, this was an early decision by Amazon during the days of dialup accounts and limited email access. Two different people (eg, a couple) might share the same email address but want separate shopping accounts.

[Edit] This was covered in RISKS in 2008. See http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/25.39.html#subj12 .

> Steve Loughran: Regarding the issue about Amazon allowing >1 login per e-mail address, its a historical legacy that they probably hate. Remember back in 1995 when the whole family had one compuserve or AOL e-mail address? That's when Amazon was created, and that is where they came up with the fact that an Amazon user does not have a 1:1 mapping of e-mail->userID. What they do have is a mapping of (e-mail,password)->userID; you can create two accounts with the same e-mail address, but you will get into trouble if you try and give them the same password. I'm not sure what happens, so try it and see.

> The newer Amazon services, such as the Amazon Web Services, have a stricter "one e-mail address" per account rule. Clearly their support organisation has learned the error of the original design decision.

It doesn't seem possible merge multiple accounts. See this Amazon transcript for a recent example: http://www.amazon.com/forum/amazon?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx...

dancryer 12 years ago | |

Thanks dalke, that's really interesting...

I can only imagine the number of heated arguments this has caused internally for Amazon!

ryutin 12 years ago |

I have the same problem. I don't understand what purpose that can serve.

Both are amazon.com accounts. One password links to a Prime account; the other, a non-Prime account. It started around 5-6 years ago. I vaguely recall that it must have started with a call to someone to change my password and later I upgraded one of them with Prime.

Maddening until I figured it out. Weird stuff.

ancarda 12 years ago |

Is she logging into the same domain? For instance, I have to use "amazon.co.uk" but most of the time, I land on "amazon.com" and wonder why I can't login. Perhaps she has two accounts one on each site? That happened to me before I figured out each domain is totally separated.

brudgers 12 years ago |

To make it easier to make a purchase.

An email address is not an ID.

possibilistic 12 years ago | |

For all intents and purposes an email address is a unique identifier. This is the status quo that the rest of the internet maintains.

I've got two Amazon accounts under the same email address that happen to have two different passwords. My order history is more or less split evenly between the two since either password mnemonic works. It has caused such frustration that I even stopped buying digital goods on their platform and switched to using Google Play. (It's not the only reason for my decision, but it certainly factored in.)