Hi mamas – this is going to be a long one, but so was my night so….

My best friend threw me the most amazing baby shower last weekend. I was left nearly speechless (nearly… let’s be honest, I don’t think I could ever truly be speechless) at the outpouring of love and support that my friends and family showered baby Olivia and her mama with. I was and am SO thankful!

Last night, my husband and I decided to make use of the 15% Registry Completion Discount to order the must-haves that weren’t purchased off of our Amazon registry.

It. Was. A. Nightmare.

I’ll start with the credit card fiasco. Bobby and I have been planning on applying for the Amazon Prime credit card to take advantage of 5% back for a while now because we use Amazon A LOT. The site is always yelling at me when I check-out to “sign up now and get $70 off your order!” so I figured a day when we were expecting to spend a lot was a good day to bite the bullet and apply for the card. So I did. But I applied for the wrong card.

Amazon, why can’t you make anything easy? I went to my account and saw a big flashy button at the top of the page that prompted me to apply for the Amazon Prime Store Card. That was the only option, so I didn’t think anything of it until, at the end, it showed this:

I had applied and been instantly approved for the Amazon Prime Store card, which can only be used on Amazon and has a WAY higher interest rate. &%$#*&!! I tried chatting with Customer Service (not the first OR last time I did that during this whole ordeal) but the representative was no help so we just decided to apply for the other card too. What’s one more credit card and one more hit to my credit score, right? *insert eyeroll*

So. Applied for new card. Approved. Good. Moving on.

Now, I’m no crazy person, so I had already obsessively read all of the rules associated with the Registry Completion Discount several times (wait…. that’s not crazy, is it?), and I knew that in order to have the discount applied to your purchase you needed to follow a few rules. Let me list them for you and tell you how I very intentionally, though unsuccessfully followed them.

#1. The completion discount can be redeemed by the primary registrant only.

That sounds simple enough! When we created our registry, we only had one log-in which was associated with my husband’s name and email address. In order to hide gift purchases from each other, we ended up splitting up into two accounts that are part of an “Amazon Family” several months ago. But I knew this rule! I navigated to my registry settings and swapped our names and email addresses so I was listed as the owner and he was the co-registrant. HAHA! I thought I was so smart. What I DIDN’T see was the little blue “swap registry owners” link (see arrow in picture below). By swapping our names and email addresses, I was simply changing what buyers who search for our registry see, but not what Amazon sees. Tony, the Customer Service representative who ended up helping me figure out all the ways I was breaking these rules, pointed out that link and then confirmed that the change went through on HIS end as well as mine.

Unfortunately, we didn’t figure out this “solution” until AFTER I placed a +/- $400 order. Which means Tony had to cancel my order and I had to start over. AWESOME. 

It only took us 2 hours to make sure we were following rules #2 and #3  closely while painstakingly deciding which items were must haves and which could wait until our little one is more mobile… no big deal.

#2. Eligible items must be added to your cart from [the] completion discount view to receive the discount.

Now this one, we did correctly. In order to get to the completion discount view you need to navigate to your Registry, click on the little down arrow next to the colorful “Baby Registry” logo at the top left of the screen, click Offers & Benefits, scroll to Registry Completion Discount, and click Redeem Now.

It’s a lot of steps and it’s not intuitive. You’d assume that you could just go to your registry and start clicking “add to cart” but you’d be wrong. If you do not click Redeem Now and then add items to cart FROM THAT SCREEN, there is no way to apply the discount before you place your order. There’s no code or button that you can magically apply at the end. There’s no Tony who can apply the discount for you if you mess up. This is the only way.

One more thing about this rule? Changing quantities. Quoted from Amazon:

• To change the quantity of an item, first delete the item from your cart and then add it from the completion discount view with the new quantity.

So let’s say I want two packs of two pacifiers. FROM THE REDEEM NOW PAGE I need to change the quantity to ‘2’ and THEN click Add to Cart. If you only add one and later decide you want two, you need to go to your cart, delete it, go back through all of the steps above to get to the Redeem Now page, change the quantity to 2 and Add to Cart again. Don’t rush. You’re going to screw this up and it’s incredibly frustrating.

#3. Only eligible items displayed in the Completion Discount View in your Baby Registry qualify for the Completion Discount.

You have to dig a little deeper into the Terms & Conditions to find this one but it’s important. One of the things that I do to save money on Amazon is check for open box deals. If you don’t do this and you’re on any kind of budget, I highly recommend it. To find these hidden discounts, look below the Add to Cart button on the main page of any item. Often there is a link to Other Sellers on Amazon. This glider, for example, shows 30 open box & new products from $106.39 (that’s $23 and almost 18% less than the original price!).

If you can score an open box from Amazon Warehouse (fulfilled by Amazon), chances are you’re going to get either a perfect product with a damaged box or an item with a tiny defect in the paint or something that is seriously not a big deal. And if you get it and it’s worse that you expect, you can return it within 30 days for free, just like any other item. Sweet deal if you ask me.

But why am I talking about this in my Amazon registry rant? Because, I don’t think that rule #3 is very clear about why you can’t use this open box trick and still get your 15% off. AND when I talked to Tony and told him that I was doing this, he never mentioned that it wouldn’t work.

When you click off of the infamous Redeem Now page to go to the screen above where open box deals are listed, you’re essentially breaking rule #3. You’re adding an item to your cart that is not “displayed in the Completion Discount View”. After adding 3 or 4 of these puppies to my cart I realized that the 15% discount wasn’t working for those items so we started calculating which discount was greater – the open box discount or the registry completion discount. Whichever was great, we used. It took extra time, but we  need to save every penny we can as we prepare for this little one.

In the end.

I’ll write another post eventually about what we ended up purchasing and why, but in the end we spent $388.94 on top of the gift cards that were applied to our account by signing up for not one, but two credit cards. If we had not gone through the hassle of re-doing the whole order to get the Completion Discount to work, that total would have been about $450, so I would call it Worth the Trouble. But come on Amazon. Give a mama-to-be with raging pregnancy brain and a short temper a break and make this process a little more user friendly.

Love, Samantha