When the Hitachi nailer had the $20 promotion, I thought I would think about it, and so purchased it by specifying by check. I ended up forgetting about it. When I checked today, I decided to try switching it to credit and the promotion was no longer applied. It makes sense, depending on which way you look at it, but just wondering if this is how it has always been since this was the first time I was trying the payment-method-change-to-give-me-time-to-reconsider method.
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Until May, Amazon had the option of paying directly from your bank account. This option was then "temporarily" not allowed.
It is apparently on hold while the bugs are worked out of Amazon payments, a new buyer/seller interface that will allow offsite payment through Amazon (and that will allow paying from bank accounts as well as credit cards. Can anyone say "PayPal competition?")
Meanwhile, the pay-by-check-and-money-order option is somewhat ragged, though in gbtower's case it worked according to theory: the order date determines the price, the order becomes pending until your paper check or mo catches up with the system at which time it completes.
According to comments on one of the Amazon developer and programming fora, the check-and-money-order-option was so low-volume before May that transactions were as close to being "manually handled" as anything there. And for some reason Amazon didn't expect that "temporarily" disabling the option to pay direct from bank account would increase the volume of check-and-money-order sales anywhere near as much as it did.
While I have heard that people who had both a bank account and credit card for payment methods before the "temporary disable" have been able to switch specific orders from pay-by-check-or-money-order to credit card (as gbtower did) without changing the sales amount, this appears to be the result of either individual customer service interventions or unusual confluence of account, order and address factors.Comment
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Copied from a post I made a while back on the subject:
"[Pay by check and take up to 1 month to decide if you want the item.] Just be aware that after you place the order you can only cancel or change payment method/billing address and shipping address. You can't change quantities or only cancel one item in an order. So I usually place separate orders (of 1 each of items I want) to allow me to easily pick and choose what I want to be delivered. It helps to have Prime for this of course, because I don't have to worry about a minimum order amount for free shipping. It is also a great way to assure you get the absolute minimum price for an item you don't have an immediate need for (shhhh... ).
One other note. If you are placing an order that is a great deal because of a promotion updating any part of the order may remove the promotion. If you are concerned this is the case I would suggest one of 2 things.
1. Mail in the check rather than changing the payment method.
2. Call up an Amazon CSR so they can see the order total before and after the switch to the credit card. If a promotion is removed the CSR will usually request a refund of the promotional amount removed or simply change the item price to reflect the appropriate amount.
If you don't do this, yes you usually can call or email and explain the situation (you will have proof of the original order total in the confirmation email) but trust me, it is a PITA. You don't need to worry about your order total changing if the item price is simply flucuating."
The last thing I should note is that it is very likely that an order may be cancelled if you select "pay by check" on a closeout item. Amazon doesn't necessarily reserve the item for you, only the price (at least in my experience).Last edited by profx; 10-21-2007, 11:31 AM.Comment
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