Receiving duplicate gifts from Amazon wishlists?

In My Humble Opinion
1

My family (and I) rather lack in creativity and have agreed to purchase Christmas gifts for each other pretty much exclusively through Amazon. So each of us puts down our ideas on a personal wishlist (and we put up a list for our kids as well).

Every year, my brother and/or I manage to receive duplicate gifts, one of which always seems to come from my father (or to be more precise, from his wife who does all the online ordering). It would be funny if it weren’t so darn frustrating.

My instinct is to suspect my stepmother, who is not terribly detail-oriented. But of course, it could be one of my other family members who somehow befuddled the system.

Or it could be Amazon. It was my understanding that if a gift is purchased from a wishlist, it should disappear so that no one else can buy the same thing.

So do you think it is Amazon’s fault, or one of my family members? And in either case, how?

2

If you purchase the item from Amazon, using the link in the wishlist, it will be removed from the list. However, if you note the item and then go find it cheaper somewhere else (my mother’s approach) or even just remember it and go separately into Amazon and buy it later, Amazon has no way of knowing that it was purchased as a gift for you. There is an option on the wishlist to select “Buying this gift elsewhere?” to indicate that it has been purchased, but not everyone has the awareness to do that.

3

I thought of that, and explicitly told my family to use the purchased elsewhere option. Of course they may had ignored that advice…