Tips to Buying the Amazon Kindle 2nd Generation for $89

On Black Friday (Yes Virginia, the Real Black Friday) at 10am MST the world will be waiting at Amazon.com.  They have announced that they will be selling a limited quantity of 2nd Generation Kindles with FREE Sprint 3G.  And just so you know, the world is waiting – I’ve seen this on about a million tweets (only a slight exaggeration), all over Facebook, and I even posted it this morning on Facebook as well.  I imagine their servers will be able to handle the load but wouldn’t doubt seeing these go in seconds.

With those fearful statistics, I thought I would share a couple of tips to get you ready to snag this (or any other lightning) deal.  And if you do, we want to hear about it!

• Minutes before I would suggest going to the Amazon.com Black Friday page and find the Kindle in the slider (see below for an example of the slider).  This is extremely important as waiting at the 2nd Generation Kindle page won’t show the lightning price – its important to be on the Black Friday page.
• Make sure to find the Kindle on the slider.  It might show a Gold Box icon (see below) but the Upcoming Deal text should give you enough information to let you know that it will be the Kindle.

• Know if you really want it – the hesitation to click Add to Cart could just make you lose it.  And buying it because of the frenzy when you really didn’t want it will give you buyer’s remorse (even though you can return it – Amazon.com makes that easy as well).
• Wait for the time to start and be ready to click on Add to Cart as quickly as you see it.  From everything I’ve seen today, when the time runs down to zero it should change to the product and let you add it to your cart immediately – no page refresh required.
• From all our research it appears that clicking the Add to Cart reserves that item for you.  One of our readers (Thanks Averi!) mentioned the item can stay in your cart for 15 minutes and that you’ll get a warning at 10 minutes that you need to purchase it.  This should definitely give you enough time to purchase the item but don’t delay.
• Because the world is watching (remember Amazon.com is the biggest store on earth and the Kindle is the #1 gift for men & women) you could see the Add to Cart button disappear almost immediately and be replaced with Join waitlist.  This is important:  Click on the Join waitlist as quickly as possible (see below for an example).  If someone puts a Kindle in their cart and then decides not to buy it, the next person in the queue will be prompted with a pop-up box in their Amazon.com that its theirs (or that they need to click on a button to make it theirs).  The sooner you click on the Join waitlist, the sooner you are in the queue – don’t hesitate!

• Finally, if you are in the queue, don’t leave Amazon.com for a while.  It should tell you when you join the queue your place in line and your chances of getting one.  If you leave their site then you are out of the queue.  Just make sure to do some window-shopping in Amazon.com until you are either tired of waiting or you get a message that they are all gone.

Hopefully if you follow these steps you will have a decent chance of getting a Kindle (or any other lightning deal as well!).  If you do then leave a comment and let us know.  And if you couldn’t, then we want to hear just how bad it was.  We will probably be watching just to see how fast it goes!