This was considered a feature back in the day; it was called MASE - Multiple Account, Same Email. I'm pretty sure you can just change the email on one of them to get out of that state.
The way it was explained to me: originally, Amazon didn't want there to be any barriers to someone making a purchase on the website, not even the barrier of having to reset a forgotten password. So the choice was made to allow people to create new accounts with the same email address (such as when attempting to check out; that's when this would likely happen). Each account was distinguished at login by its email + password combination.
It was indeed called "Multiple Accounts, Same Email", though I only heard that term applied to it much later (after the phenomenon of these accounts was identified as a problem that the company needed to resolve). I don't think it was exactly what I'd call a feature, in the sense that I don't think anyone expected users to do it intentionally, so much as it was "We don't want to lose a purchase to someone getting stuck at the login screen".
The Web and its users have evolved significantly since those early days, and resetting a password by email is no longer the barrier it once was. Among other reasons: web users are savvy to the idea of having accounts, which was not true in Amazon's early days; and email is a lot faster and more reliable now.
Allowing multiple accounts to share an email address proved to be a problematic decision later on for a number of reasons. Amazon doesn't allow this any more, at least not from the primary sign-in screen; it gives an "Email address already in use" error.
Microsoft have a similar problem relaterade to them merging a lot of services but not accounts. I have an old Xbox Live account on my Xbox 360 which I can’t reset the password for since the email/username was the same as for my Skype account and my Hotmail/MSN account back in the days. This mess is still causing me tons of problems anytime I try to log in to something Microsoft related.
Back in the late 90s, there weren't a ton of free email services and most people used an account from their ISP. Extra accounts were hard to come by. If you had a family sharing an internet connection, they might very well share an email address too. This let them have individual Amazon accounts.
So I have an amazon.com and amazon.in account. The latter one is my main account but the former one I created to redeem a gift card I got from a survey.
Seems more like an artifact of Amazon having enabled global logins late into product development than a "feature" to me.
Are you sure it's two accounts? I am using the same login on two different Amazon sites as well, but I'd call that SSO more so than "two accounts on one email address", since all data is separated by country, but the email and password are the same.
Maps to the account me and will (if configured correctly) put the mail in a folder called folder if such exists.
The reason you might want many accounts with the same email seem many to me if you don't realise that you can create arbitrary distinct emails this easily.
Yes, that's exactly what plus addresses exist for!
It seems to me like all benefits of the "exact same email, multiple accounts" feature are vastly outweighed by the inconvenience for users simply forgetting that they already have an account, and creating a second one by accident that way.
I mean, even I end up almost creating an account by accident every now and then (mostly on sites using the horrible "signup is the default, login needs one additional click" pattern), and I do so using autofill from a password manager!
Indeed! And even worse, some services will happily accept "+" in email fields, but then some part of the service fails to encode the "+" sign correctly, so some features may be broken in unexpected ways.
Sometimes you can't even contact Customer Services because "your account doesn't exist" (because you cannot feed the correct email address to their customer service site).
Thankfully it's rare, but when it happens it's extremely infuriating.
Just so you know, that plus-hack is by no means universal (in addition to the frustrating “you can’t use a plus sign” thing you’ll encounter at various email fields around the net).
Gmail supports it. Microsoft does not. Neither does Yahoo/AOL. It likely was not widely supported in the 90s either. It’s a nice hack but it doesn’t solve every problem.
