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

by dancryer on 1/17/14, 12:17 PM with 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.

  • by dalke on 1/17/14, 1:09 PM

    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...

  • by ryutin on 1/17/14, 1:13 PM

    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.

  • by ancarda on 1/17/14, 12:20 PM

    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.

  • by brudgers on 1/17/14, 1:07 PM

    To make it easier to make a purchase.

    An email address is not an ID.