Feed Sign in with OpenID OpenID

Simon Willison’s Weblog

Amazon makes you lie to log off (via) Amazingly, the only way to sign out of Amazon these days is to use the “If you’re not XXX, click here” link—the traditional “sign out” link has quietly vanished.

Posted 2nd October 2007 at 1:19 pm

Tagged , , , ,

5 comments

  1. They invented one click ordering (well, they have the patent for it at any rate) in order to lower the barriers to impulsive buying. All that goes away if users can log out and forget their passwords.

    Stephen Paulger - 2nd October 2007 18:00 - #

  2. I don't know about Amazon US (which I what I presume you're using), but with Amazon UK, you can also click the "Your Account" button on the top right-hand corner and then click "Sign out from our site" right at the bottom of the page in the "Useful information" section.

    Granted, it's not the most intuitive of places to put a logoff link, but at least this one doesn't involve lying!

    Ruben Arakelyan - 2nd October 2007 19:54 - #

  3. I've been a heavy Amazon.com customer for ten years, and I don't remember there ever being a prominent sign-out link. I'm pretty sure it didn't "quietly vanish." It never appeared in the first place.

    ss12851 - 2nd October 2007 20:10 - #

  4. It's understandable; I imagine Amazon want to do as much as possible to keep a user logged in.

    Dan - 3rd October 2007 22:22 - #

  5. I wonder why they went for that instead of "If you're not XXX, _sign out_". That would be two fewer letters, would avoid having a link labeled "click here" (which is bad for scanning and accessibility), and would let you sign out without totally lying.

    Jesse Ruderman - 5th October 2007 00:20 - #

Comments are closed.
A django site