who knew?

Amazon quietly cashes in on sex toy market
Under the heading of Sex and Sensuality, discreetly located under the Health and Personal care section of its US site, Amazon is offering more than 40,000 products, including over 9,000 vibrators and more than 5,500 “sex-enhancers”.

The items are being sold through Amazon under its increasingly important third party retailer business, which accounts for more than a quarter of the items it sells, and which includes mainstream retailers such as Macy’s and Toys R Us.

Amazon says that it reviews the images that third party merchants place on its site, and that they cannot contain nudity, even on product packaging – although a survey of the site indicates that this policy does not extend to realistic representations of body parts. “Descriptions for the various products cannot contain profanity or graphic adult language,” Ms Smith added.

The pages carry some regular Amazon interactive features, such as lists of items recommended by other users, and the opportunity to review and rate products or to write users' guides.

But they do not include the “share your own customer images” feature that appears on Amazon's house and kitchen ware pages. And unlike other pages on the site, they do not send personalised recommendations to the homepage the next time a customer logs on.