Amazon Debuts Way for Teens to Buy Stuff on Parents’ Accounts With Approval (Oct 11, 2017)

Amazon has just announced a way for teenagers to buy items from its site through parent accounts, with either an item-by-item approval process or pre-set spending limits. Parents will receive summary text notifications when their teens have placed an order and have the option to reply with a simple “Y” via SMS to approve the order, or to see full details on Amazon’s site. This feels like yet another example of both Amazon’s maturity in the e-commerce space and the way it continues to evolve its offerings even as other retailers continue to play catchup on its core services, and of its need to continually expand its addressable market for its e-commerce services to new potential customers. We’ve already seen this with its attempts to serve cash-centric customers, and we’re now seeing it with this move into serving teenagers more directly rather than through their parents. This will, of course, also train those teens to buy from Amazon from an early age, bypassing other potential sites, while leveraging the benefits of Prime. Feels pretty smart all around.

via TechCrunch


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