Do you want to get free stuff through Amazon in exchange for writing a review on Amazon of the free stuff that you got? You can! It’s relatively easy, so long as you’re willing to put in the time to write reviews! Here’s how.

Exactly a year ago, Amazon unveiled Amazon Launchpad, which is the section on Amazon where start-ups can hawk their wares. Today Amazon has announced the ‘Kickstarter Collection’, where customers can purchase products ‘as seen on Kickstarter’.

You may have received an email from Amazon this week that says “Your Credit from the Apple eBooks Antitrust Settlement Is Ready to Use” – and guess what: it’s legitimate! That credit will show up in your Amazon account as a gift card balance.

An Amazon insider has told MIT’s Technology Review that Amazon is gearing up the Echo to enable Alexa to be able to detect your mood. So, for example, if you are in a bad mood when interacting with Alexa, your Echo will detect that and respond accordingly.

It has been exactly a year since we first unboxed and reviewed the Amazon Echo, and Siri’s cousin, Alexa. In that year, Alexa has learned many new tricks (mostly through having acquired new “skills”), as well as having a baby (Amazon Dot) and a low-energy clone (Amazon Tap). Here are some of the new tricks that Alexa has learned in the past year.

People are starting to receive their preordered Amazon Echo Dots. The difference between the Echo Dot and the Echo Tap is basically that the Echo Tap is a wireless, portable Echo that is not voice-activated, while the Echo Dot is an Echo without a full speaker (the Echo Dot does have a small on-board speaker), that is voice-activated, and that you connect to either a wired or wireless bluetooth speaker of your own. But you can also use the Echo Dot as an extension for your Echo! (By the way, if your Echo Dot is hanging during wifi setup, we cover that too.)

If you don’t have kids who use children’s apps, you may not be aware of the lawsuits against Apple, Google, and Amazon for allowing children to make unauthorized (because unauthenticated by password) purchases in apps that are geared towards children.

This week, with no announcement or fanfare, Amazon quietly started charging sales tax on orders being shipped to Colorado, making Colorado one of 28 states for which Amazon collects sales tax. Amazon charges tax for orders shipped to Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.

It’s not all that often that Amazon gets it wrong, especially when you consider that, by some estimates, Amazon ships more than 3million packages a day. Still, sometimes an Amazon order arrives with a damaged box, or damaged items, or just plain bad packaging. Amazon has actually made it easy to provide them with feedback and to report poor packing or damaged packaging, if you know how. Here’s how to report damaged packaging or bad packing, or leave other packing or packaging feedback, at Amazon.

We’ve talked in the past about the Amazon Music service (also called Amazon Prime Music), and we’ve raved about the Amazon Echo, through which you can stream your Amazon music cloud library, but Amazon has changed how you upload music to the Amazon Music cloud service, so here’s how to upload iTunes music to Amazon Music.

“We’re sorry, an error has occurred. Please reload this page and try again,” reads the error that Amazon users started getting today, when trying to view individual product pages. But no matter how many times you reload that page – or any page – all you get is that Amazon error message, “We’re sorry, an error has occurred. Please reload this page and try again,” over and over. If this is happening to you, try this.

We all know that fake reviews on sites such as Yelp and Amazon are the bane of both the business and their customers. And some of us knew that you can buy fake reviews for your product on places such as FiveRR. Now Amazon is suing over one thousand Fiverr sellers, all whom have advertised, sold, and posted phony reviews on Amazon, says Amazon.

Last week Amazon announced their new Etsy competitor, Handmade at Amazon. Of course, these aren’t things that are handmade by Amazon, it’s a marketplace for Amazon sellers and artisans to showcase and sell their handmade craft items. But will the Amazon handmade marketplace really do Etsy in?

Amazon offers some things that are unlimited (such as their unlimited photo storage service, and their Kindle unlimited service), but did you know that your Amazon purchases can be subjected to the generally unspoken Amazon Purchase Limit Policy?

There are many banned words that are prohibited in Amazon reviews, and that will get your review rejected in a New York minute. Unhelpfully, Amazon doesn’t offer a list of forbidden words, and they don’t let you know the offending word or words in their rejection notice. So we have decided to create a list here. Below are the words that we know or suspect will get your review rejected by Amazon – please help fellow Amazon reviewers by adding to this list.