When you buy an Amazon hardware product, like an Echo, Fire TV, or Fire tablet, it arrives already linked to your Amazon account in order to reduce any friction with the setup process. But if you want to give one of these devices as a gift to someone else, here’s how to unregister your Amazon account from the device.
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Ideally, when you go to buy the device from Amazon’s website, you’ll check the box next to “This is a gift” before you add it to your cart and check out. This makes sure that Amazon doesn’t ship you the device with your Amazon account already linked to it. Instead, they’ll just make sure that it’s not registered with any account at all, and the person who receives it can link their own Amazon account.
However, this checkbox isn’t blatantly obvious, and even if you know it’s there, you might not think twice about it when you go to hit the buy button. Plus, many shoppers may not even know that Amazon devices come pre-registered and linked to their own Amazon account, so both the shopper and the recipient of the gift would be in for a surprise.
So if you forgot to mark the device as a gift during the checkout process, it’s not too late to unregister the device from your Amazon account. Here’s how to do it.
First off, go to Amazon.com and hover over “Your Account” toward the upper-right corner of the screen—make sure you’re logged in first.
A pop-up menu will appear. From this list, select “Manage Your Content and Devices”.
On the next screen, click on the “Your Devices” tab.
This tab will show you all of your Amazon devices that you have associated with your Amazon account. Go ahead and select the one that you want to unregister.
On the section below, click on “Device Actions”.
In the drop-down menu that appears, click on “Deregister”.
You’ll get a pop-up warning saying that doing this “will remove all content from the device and many features will not work.” Click on “Deregister” to confirm the action.
After that, the device will no longer be associated with your Amazon account and you can freely gift the item to someone else, from which they can login using their own Amazon account at that point.