How to shop on Amazon

To Set Up Your Account

Type Amazon.co.uk into the search bar of whichever search engine you use (e.g. Google).

Place your pointer at the end of the address and press enter on your keyboard. (This is the key on the right hand side of your keyboard that will either say ‘enter’ or have a large arrow on it – or both!)

You will now be transferred to the Amazon home page. In the top right hand side of the page you will see some text. Look for ‘Account & Lists’.

To the right of Accounts and Lists you will see a small grey triangle. Click on this.

You will now be transferred to the Sign-In page. Look towards the bottom of this for a grey rectangle with the words ‘Create your Amazon Account’ on it. Click on this.

Fill out the boxes that appear under Create Account (this is the page which will just have opened up).

Once you have done that, click on ‘Create your Amazon account’.

You will now see a screen asking you to ‘Verify email address’.

To verify your email address you need to type a number into the box underneath OTP (One Time Password). You get this number by going into your email account (but don’t close the Amazon email verification page) and opening an email from Amazon which carries the title ‘Verify your new Amazon account’. When opened, the email will look like this:

Enter the number in the email into the OTP box.

Once you enter the number into the box, click on ‘Create your Amazon account’. You are now signed in to Amazon and will find yourself on the home page.

Congratulations – you are now ready to start using your Amazon account!

To shop on Amazon

If you have not already done so, you will need to sign in by going to Amazon. co.uk and looking for Accounts and Lists on the right hand side of the page. Place your pointer on the grey triangle to right of this and click on the left side of your mouse. This opens up the Sign-in page.

Type in your email address and click on ‘continue’. You will then be asked to enter your password. Enter this and then click on ‘Sign-in’.

You are now signed in and on the home page. Look for the word ‘All’ to the left of the search bar.

Put your pointer on the black triangle to the right of ‘All’ and click on the left hand side of your mouse. This will bring up a list of shopping categories. They are in alphabetical order.

Decide what category you are interested in. Let’s say it’s Lighting. Use your mouse to guide your pointer down to Lighting and select it by clicking on the left hand side of your mouse once you have highlighted it.

You will now have an empty search bar with Lighting at the left hand side of it.

You now need to type into the search bar exactly what kind of lighting you are looking for. Let’s say you want a reading lamp which stands on the floor.

You now want Amazon to show you what kinds of floor/standing reading lamps they are selling. You do this by clicking on the magnifying glass to the right of the search box.

There are likely to be lots of options – too many to go through – and most won’t be what you are looking for anyway.

This is easily managed by ‘filtering’ the results so that they match more closely what you are looking for. Filtering is done by selecting from a range of options on the left hand side of the page. All of the options have a box beside them which you click on if it is of interest. Clicking on a box inserts a tick in it.

Let’s say you want to buy a reading lamp which costs between £15 and £50 and which Amazon will deliver free of charge. You select the relevant options and the filter panel will now look like this.

By refining your choice of reading lamp in this way, the choice of what you can buy will be reduced. In this case, you would find that out of the 40,000 results you were told were available to you initially, only one ‘fits the bill’.

Now that you have found what you are looking for, the only thing that remains for you to do is to buy the lamp. You do this by putting your pointer on the name of the lamp you want and clicking on the left hand side of your mouse. This will open up a page which will allow you to begin the process of buying the lamp.

Put your pointer on Add to Basket and double click on the left hand side of your mouse. This puts the Ikea lamp into your virtual shopping basket, which you will see by looking at the basket icon at the top right of the page.

Below the basket, you will also see the details of the lamp cost. Just below this is a yellow box saying ‘Proceed to checkout’. If you are happy that everything looks right with your order, click on this box.

You will now be transferred to a page that requires you to enter your payment details and delivery address, or, if you have already done this before, to confirm that these are the same as they were the last time you bought something from Amazon. You will be able to review all these and once you are happy they are correct you can click on Buy Now.

That is your order placed. Amazon will send you an email confirming the order. You will also receive emails telling you when it has been dispatched and when to expect delivery.

Remember to sign out of your account when you have finished your shopping. You do this by going back to the Amazon home page, locating Account and Lists again and clicking on the grey triangle. This opens up a long list of topics relating to your Amazon account. But the one you want is the final one – Sign Out. Use your pointer to select this and then click on it. That’s you signed out – until the next time you want to shop for something on Amazon.

Happy shopping!