On the left side of the page you ll find Amazon s search box, which you can use to search for specific products. Also on the left are links to Amazon s individual stores for specific product categories. These stores include: Apparel & Accessories

Kids & Baby Clothing Kitchen & Housewares Magazine Subscriptions Medical Supplies Music Office Products Outdoor Living Pet Toys & Supplies Scientific Supplies Shoes Software Sporting Goods Tools & Hardware Toys & Games Video

Click a link to browse all the merchandise in a store, or use the search box to search for specific merchandise. You should also become familiar with two other pages: Click the See More Stores tab on the navigation bar to view a list of all available Amazon stores; this is often the quickest way to navigate from one store to another. The Friends & Favorites page (go to Your Store Friends & Favorites) offers a collection of useful personal services, including discussion boards and gift registries.

From the looks of things, Amazon must be one of the largest and most diverse retailers on the face of the planet. Just look at all that stuff Amazon has for sale everything from compact discs to compact cars! But just because an item is for sale on the Amazon site doesn t mean that it s actually Amazon that s doing the selling. Read on to learn more about where the stuff you buy on Amazon actually comes from.

First off, even when Amazon is the actual retailer of a product, the company doesn t always physically possess the item you want to order. While Amazon does maintain several large warehouses across the United States, it also relies on a network of third-party distributors to stock many of the items it offers for sale. So when you order a particular book title, for example, that book is just as likely to come from the warehouse of distributor partner Ingram (a large book wholesaler) as it is to come from Amazon s own warehouse. In other instances, Amazon never takes possession of merchandise from the manufacturer. Your order is forwarded from Amazon s site directly to the manu facturer; your order is then fulfilled by the manufacturer without ever hitting Amazon s distribution center. This reliance on third parties sometimes results in odd shipping scenarios. You might order three different books, expecting them to ship in a single box, but then find that your order is shipped in three different boxes sent from three dif ferent locations. All the boxes might say Amazon on them, and they all might contain Amazon invoices. (That s because Amazon s partners work hard to make you think that it s actually Amazon that s fulfilling your order.) But if you look closely, you ll see that the senders addresses are all different, and that (sometimes) the invoices are subtly different from those contained in a real Amazon shipment. (For example, some Amazon partners don t include ship ment totals on their invoices; Amazon itself always does.) There s nothing wrong with this, per se, other than being a little confusing. That s because Amazon treats the multiple shipments as a single order for the purposes of calculating your shipping costs. If it costs more to break up a ship ment into multiple components from multiple locations (which it almost cer tainly does), Amazon absorbs the cost.

Don t confuse this multiple-location shipping with your option of either com bining items into a single shipment (to reduce shipping costs) or splitting items into multiple shipments (to get faster delivery), which is discussed in Secret #427.