So I do share my Amazon account with my partner, but only so we can have a single Kindle library. Other than that, it seems like a disaster... obviously it's personal preference, but it's a lot easier to deal with security and data models when you're using them the way they were built to be used (1 person to 1 account.)
From your description, it sounds like you really have two accounts, but you just do all your purchasing from one.
Sharing a free email account just seems like an exercise in frustration. The whole usage model for email - inbox, notifications, read/unread, filing, deleting - is designed on the presumption that the messages are being consumed by a single individual. I've always viewed sharing an email account as something that old folks do because it maps to their model of a physical mailbox, or because they're too feeble to maintain / login to multiple accounts.
Having worked for Amazon, I suspect you're not getting the benefit of a lot of their recommendation technology if you're sharing an account. It's not just about purchases - it's about every page in your clickstream and how that's used to find products you'll like. We actually had projects in some services dedicated to reducing sharing of accounts, partially for that reason.
From your description, it sounds like you really have two accounts, but you just do all your purchasing from one.
Sharing a free email account just seems like an exercise in frustration. The whole usage model for email - inbox, notifications, read/unread, filing, deleting - is designed on the presumption that the messages are being consumed by a single individual. I've always viewed sharing an email account as something that old folks do because it maps to their model of a physical mailbox, or because they're too feeble to maintain / login to multiple accounts.
Having worked for Amazon, I suspect you're not getting the benefit of a lot of their recommendation technology if you're sharing an account. It's not just about purchases - it's about every page in your clickstream and how that's used to find products you'll like. We actually had projects in some services dedicated to reducing sharing of accounts, partially for that reason.