Amazon.com: Good Source for Holiday E-Cards

Looking for a site that offers free holiday e-cards? Amazon.com is well known for their online retail store where you can buy books, music, DVDs, electronics, toys, and a lot more. It's actually more of an online mall nowadays than a store. But tucked away in a small corner of their website is a service many people tend to overlook when buying items: Amazon's e-cards.

Amazon's e-cards have everything you'd expect: several categories of greeting cards (including holiday and birthday cards); a reminder of the holidays that are coming up, including holidays for countries other than the US; and options to customize the look and feel of the text. There's a wide variety of cards for most occasions, such as for Christmas or Hanukah and birthdays, and many of them are even animated.

When you select which card you want to send, enter the recipient's name, email address, your name and email address, and a short message that you want to include with the card. (There's a 500 character limit, so you can't send a letter-sized note inside the card. If you plan on sending a longer or more complicated message, this may not be the best option for you.) After typing your message, you can choose the font type: Arial, Times New Roman, or Courier. Personally, I've found that Courier is often a hard font to read compared to, say, Arial. You'll also be able to choose from a selection of font colors, and whether or not you want to include the music that normally comes with the card.

After you've chosen these options, you're given the chance to include an Amazon.com gift certificate with the card. You can give anywhere from $5.00 to $5,000 in five dollar increments, which the recipient will be able to use for anything on the website. This choice is optional, and you can choose not to purchase a gift certificate; you'll still be allowed to send a card for free.

If you want to send a card but are afraid you'll forget the date, Amazon will let you postdate the card and have it sent automatically up to two weeks in advance. At the time specified, Amazon will send the card automatically with no further effort on your part. After you complete the form to send the card, if the recipient is a previous Amazon customer (or have otherwise created an Amazon account online) you'll have the option to view their "wishlist", where they may have listed items they're hoping to receive as gifts.

Amazon.com's decent selection of cards, ease of use and various customization options make them a good choice when wanting to send an e-card. The biggest drawback of the service would have to be the 500 character limit, which is understandable since so many people use the service but can be annoying if you want to say anything longer than "hi". There's no message to tell you when you go over the limit, so you have to pretty much eyeball it or otherwise use a cut-and-paste word counter. Still, aside from this minor inconvenience, Amazon.com's e-card service is one of the best out there at the moment. Most importantly, it's free, and one of the easiest e-card systems to understand.