Why Amazon "Pay With Points" Is Overrated

I have an Amazon Rewards credit card I use for the sweet, sweet reward points. I'm pretty happy with it; I do most of my Christmas shopping on the site as well as hard-to-find books and of course Kindle downloads. (Also, they were willing to extend credit to me when I was working freelance jobs and barely had a credit history, so I'm thankful for that.) I think some of you might also have a card like this or think about getting one, which is why I'm going slightly out of bounds to talk about their rewards program.

Amazon has the most useful rewards program I seem to be able to qualify for, but there is a hitch...  The normal procedure for redeeming those points is by "buying" an Amazon gift certificate off the credit card's website, which is kind of a hassle in that you have to click through to purchase it, then wait about a week to get the paper certificate, then enter the code from the paper into your Amazon account. Absurd, because isn't this one of the fabled dot-com companies that taught Americans no one would steal all their moneys if they shopped online? There's got to be an easier way! 

So when they rolled out "Shop With Points," which would supposedly let you bypass that "wait for a lil' piece of paper" step, I was excited... until I figured out that you can't use them for everything. Specifically, you can't use them for Kindle e-books, which is my most frequent purchase on Amazon these days now that I am trying to shop local more for my dead-tree needs. There are no such restrictions on Amazon gift certificates. (It also doesn't work on Amazon Fresh [groceries/homegoods] or Subscribe and Save [magazines], for those to whom that may apply.)

Not only that, I didn't notice that I wasn't drawing from my points until I had already bought 3-4 e-books with actual cash. I think there should have been a pop-up alerting me to this step, instead of me merrily 1-Clicking my way to financial Armageddon (exaggeration). The benefit to having those rewards was that I could use them on anything, as opposed to a gift certificate to a clothing store or a book store or some other specialty store -- but this is closing me off.

While we're at it, why is 1-Click the only option for e-books anyway? Is it unimaginable that someone would want to save an e-book to purchase later? Because hey, I just imagined it!

This has been your slightly disappointed Kindle consumer advocate, signing off.