Hack 16 Set Up a Group Account
Amazon's Corporate Account feature lets a business provide a single point of billing for its employees. You can use this same system to organize the purchases of everyone in your family.
If it came down to it, there's probably someone in your family you could call the Purchase Manager. You can formalize that title on Amazon by setting up a corporate account for your family, as Jim Roche at Amazon suggested. Even though they're called corporate accounts, you don't have to be a corporation to start one. Any small business, organization, or family can set one up to let a group of people make purchases with one or two people controlling the billing and shipping information.
Standard Amazon accounts are intended for a single individual. Corporate accounts let you group several standard accounts together to let one of the accounts handle billing and shipping information.
To create a group account, visit the corporate accounts home page, http://amazon.com/corporate.
Click "Open a Corporate Account" to begin the process. Once created, you can manage your account on the page you see in Figure 2-6 and invite people to join the account using their email address. Each person will receive an email asking them to confirm their invitations.
Figure 2-6. Corporate Accounts management page
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Each person participating in the account is either an Account Manager or an Account Buyer. Managers have certain privileges that buyers don't have. They can:
Add participants
Change payment and shipping information
View the order history
Assign other account managers
There are even a few actions that you can perform only if you're the founding (or primary) account manager:
Edit the account information (group name and account name)
Apply for credit with Amazon.com
