Tutorial - Setting Up Your Amazon Account

Before you start to shop at Amazon, you may want to setup your account first. This will make things a lot simpler during the checkout stage as all information will have been provided before hand. This is not mandatory, since you can also provide all the required information when you're checking out.

But let us go through this simple one-time setup to add

• Payment information
• Shipping information

Start by going to your Account -

And then go to Add a Credit or Debit Card -

From then on, just follow instructions on screen to add your credit card to it.

About credit card fees and what not. If you're based in Singapore (like me), posting a charge in a foreign currency attracts certain fees. As far as I know, CIMB charges 2.5% (including MasterCard fees) while Maybank charges 2.2% (including MasterCard fees). This will surely change in the future but I believe this is correct as it stands right now. In my experience, Standard Chartered Bank charges the most exorbitant fees so I'll avoid that.

There are also various credit card schemes where they offer rebates. I know of a FRANK card by OCBC which offers 6% rebates for online purchases, if your total spending exceeds SGD500. This post is not about which is the best credit card to hold on to so please do your own research.

Now that you have sorted out your payment, the next step is to setup your shipping address. It's known as 'Address Book' on 'Your Account' page -

Now, if you recall, you may have already provided an address earlier when you create your account. If you do, it will appear in your Address Book. You may want to consider adding your office address to it because you may want to consider shipping stuff directly to the office instead.

You're now ready to shop!

AmazonGlobal Eligible and AmazonGlobal Saver

First, let's make sure you're comfortable with the Amazon's website and how the shopping cart works. Here's the brief write-up.

Amazon has a program, known as AmazonGlobal Eligible, which will ship items to participating countries directly. However, you still have to pay for shipping, which can cost as much as or even more than the item itself. How do I know which items are eligible?

The easiest way is to search for the items you want and then look for the little check box on the left of the results page. It looks like this -

Once the box is checked, Amazon will only display items that are eligible to be shipped internationally.

If you don't see this option at all, it means none of the items within your search are eligible. You're out of luck.

Amazon went one step further for Singapore and India. They will provide free shipping (yes, FREE SHIPPING) under AmazonGlobal Saver shipping. Of course, not all items qualifies. In a nutshell, you must satisfy the following conditions -

• Have >$125 (USD) worth of qualifying products in the shopping cart
• AmazonGlobal Eligible
• Ships to a single address in Singapore or India
• Items must not weigh >20 lbs or be over-sized

I'll provide more details and tutorials to guide you through in the subsequent posts. Stay tuned!

Shopping at Amazon - The Basics

Now, shopping at Amazon isn't really different from any other online websites. You have a shopping cart. You add items to the shopping cart. You check out the cart, choose a payment method and pick your delivery speed. And then you wait for the parcel to arrive.

There's a few things you need to take note though. The free delivery that applies when you purchase over $35 worth of items is applicable only in the US. If you are sending the items out of the States, this does not apply to you.

The shopping cart also features a 'Save for Later' section. You can move items here and it will not be checked out. Why do you want to do this? Perhaps because the 'price is not right', or you just don't have a need for it right now. It's like a book mark, using the browser analogy. However, you do get price change notification each time you log in to Amazon for items in this section. This is quite a nifty feature to get updated on price fluctuations. And Amazon changes their product pricing pretty frequently for some items.

Amazon also features a 'Wish List'. As the name implies, you can move items into it and then share it with somebody else, maybe in the hope that he will buy it for you. You can have multiple Wish Lists, say for different types of items. For example, I have a list containing a list of Terry Prachett's book which I don't already own.

Whenever you're in your shopping cart page, you can also have a quick estimate on how much it cost on shipping and tax.

See, it doesn't take a genius to figure this out.

Shopping at Amazon Starts Here!

A couple of months ago, Amazon made an announcement that changed how Singaporeans do their online shopping, which is to provide direct shipping to Singapore for the majority of the items sold on Amazon. In addition, the shipping will be provided for free (yes, FREE) if you meet certain criteria.

This has obviously generated a lot of interests in the local community, judging from the 2 extremely fast moving threads in HardwareZone and numerous others in various forums during the Black Friday sales week. Now that Black Friday is over, the hype is dying down. However, I'm still going to basically jot down my thoughts in a series of posts and show you how you can shop (and hopefully save some money) on Amazon. Of course, there will still be another Black Friday in 2014, and then 2015 and so on...

A few must read follow up from here -

• The Basics
• Your First Order with Free Shipping
• Amazon Prime
• Tracking Prices
• Getting the Deals
• No Free Shipping?
• Amazon's Shipping Partners

Disclosure : All links in this site that redirects you to Amazon contains a referral tag. Now, I just want to be upfront on this. If you think the articles here are helpful, please help to support the site by buying through these links. Thank you :)