Amazon Prime tip – is that item really ineligible?

I recently searched for [riedel crystal cloth] on Amazon. Since I’m a member of Amazon.com Prime, I decided to filter the results to only items eligible for Prime’s free shipping, and clicked on the link shown below:

As you would expect, the list of results was filtered down to one item (from a list of one, actually, but that’s not important). However, the item listed didn’t have the comforting Prime logo in the description. I clicked through to the product page, and sure enough, I saw the following text:

This item is not eligible for Amazon Prime when purchased from CentralChef. See more buying choices

Confused, and convinced that Amazon had a bug (hey, I understand that generating high-quality search results is hard), I sent them a message. Surprisingly, I got a non-canned reply just a few hours later, on a Saturday night. They explained that the item is in fact sold by not only CentralChef (not Prime eligible), but also by Amazon.com itself. In order to buy from Amazon, I needed to click on the “See more buying choices” link. From there, I was able to choose Amazon as the merchant.

So there you go. If you come across an item that at first doesn’t seem to be eligible for Prime, always double-check by clicking on that “buying choices” link.