No, I Will Not Renew My Amazon Prime Membership!

When I shop online, most of the time, I end up buying from Amazon.com, because I almost never have a problem with it. It usually has good prices; it has excellent customer-generated product reviews; great shopping-cart, order-verification, and shipment tracking systems; and most of the time, when it says something's in stock, it is. In many ways, it's one of the best, if not the best, place to buy almost anything.

But criminy, Amazon is seriously messed up in several ways. Its search engine is awful: I searched for "iPod" and got four pages of results; of the 96 products listed, I'd say about 90 percent weren't actually iPods, but iPod-related products. That's fine, as long as you can filter the results, but Amazon gives you 29 (not-alphabetically listed) categories to filter by?including ?Baby.? Hmmn, I didn?t know that you could get iPod baby gear. Clicking on the link, the first product listed is a stroller; turns out it has a pocket for an iPod. OK, that kinda makes sense. But I saw a ton of iPod cases--yes, they?re iPod-related, all right, but how are they baby-related?

Next, I filtered by ?Kitchen and Housewares,? which lists 446 results (more than the total returned for "iPod"). The first listing is the Dalla Piazza Apple Slicer. How?s that related to an iPod? Oh, oh, I get it?it?s an Apple slicer. But the second product listed, Libbey 4 Pack Vina Stemless 16.5 Ounce Red Wine Glasses?I couldn?t find any connection to the company or the product.

And what about the huge number of duplicate entries? Search for some products and you'll see the same product name listed a gazillion times; the only distinction is that different third-party vendors are selling them through Amazon's storefront, but you usually can't figure that out until you click through to the product page.

Products that Amazon sells directly carry the Amazon Prime logo in search results. (Pay $79 per year, and you get "all-you-can-eat" two-day express shipping). Amazon says the deal applies to "over a million in-stock items sold by Amazon.com." That's another gripe: Products sold by third-party vendors aren't eligible for the Prime deal and because Amazon serves as a storefront for so many those vendors, I see the "not eligible for Amazon Prime" banner way too often. Sometimes you can filter search results by who sells them, so if you filter by "Amazon.com," you can limit results to only Prime-eligible products. But you can't always do that--it's inconsistent.

Because I paid for the Prime membership, I'm compelled to shop at Amazon first (the person who came up with this idea is a genius). I'll often pay more for the product itself just to take advantage of the shipping deal. Then I feel like kicking myself. And for the last month or so, I've had to look at a huge, blaring banner at the top of Amazon's site yelling at me to renew my Prime membership. I can't turn the dang thing off, either.

I won't be renewing my Prime membership this year, because I think, if I'm shopping at Amazon.com, then the deal ought to apply to anything I buy there. Sure, if we're talking about shipping a iPod, the charge probably won't be too much. One of the vendors selling an iPod, Electronics Expo, charges only $4, but that?s for standard ground shipping?it doesn?t even offer expedited shipping. But the point is, why should I have to pay for shipping if I went to the expense of buying a Prime membership?

And why should I have to steer around thousands of different vendors, examining the shipping costs individually, doing the math to add up product cost and shipping costs, and then compare the final costs and delivery times in my head? If PriceGrabber.com and all the other shopping engines can provide that information on screen, in a sortable format that makes costs easy to compare, why can't Amazon?

Sometimes you just have to know how Amazon's system works. When I searched for "ThinkPad X40 battery," I got 25 results, 14 of which were third-party batteries. None of the three Lenovo-brand batteries were eligible for Amazon Prime. But when I searched for "92P1119" (the model number), I got two different results, one of which was sold by Amazon and qualified for the shipping deal. Score!

Oh, and why the heck are so many of the products that Amazon lists ?not available"?

The biggest reason I shop at Amazon is that I just don't trust many online retailers. I've read too many of my colleague Tom Spring's stories about stores that post low prices then try to slam you with extras, or charge astronomical shipping charges, or try to stuff online pricing engines' reader reviews with fake entries, or?you get the idea. I always check where a store is located; if it's an electronics store based in Brooklyn, I shop elsewhere. Yes, that may be an irrational, knee-jerk reaction, but I'd rather deal with retailers I know for sure aren't going to hassle me.

Amazon won't hassle me--but shopping there can still be a hassle.