How to Block Amazon on Chrome and Shop on Purpose

Browsing Amazon is a quiet way to lose time and money. Redirect, the Chrome extension, adds a moment between the urge and the cart: before a pause you write down why you need it, and your past reasons are shown back to you.

By Monish Meher · Updated September 2026

Add to Chrome, free to start

3 steps

Block Amazon in under a minute

1
Install Redirect
Add Redirect to Chrome from the Chrome Web Store. Blocking one site is free and needs no account.
2
Add a rule
Open the dashboard, choose whole site and enteramazon.com
3
Choose how pauses work
Pick pause lengths and a task to finish first. Write a reason. Seeing what you wrote last time is a strong check on impulse buys.

Why Amazon is hard to put down

Online shopping is designed to shorten the gap between wanting and buying. Researchers at Princeton University and the University of Chicago crawled about 53,000 product pages on around 11,000 shopping websites and, in Dark Patterns at Scale, found 1,818 dark pattern instances across 15 types, including urgency tactics like countdown timers and scarcity messages like low stock warnings. The study looked at shopping sites broadly, not Amazon alone, but the ingredients will feel familiar: deals that expire, recommendations for what other shoppers bought, and checkout a click or two away. None of it leaves much room to ask whether you need the thing at all.

A spending check that fits in a minute#

Add a whole site rule for amazon.com and a separate rule for your country store.
Pick the reason prompt as the pause task.
Set a 15 minute pause length and a daily pause limit of one.
Keep a short list of what you plan to buy somewhere else, like a note on your phone or one of your goals. When a pause asks for a reason, write the item from the list.
Once a week, read your recent pauses on the Focus page. Reasons like "bored" or "just looking" point to the purchases worth skipping.

Your reasons are stored locally in your browser. There is no account, and your reasons are never sent to us. The point is not to stop you from shopping. It is to make sure that when you do, it was your idea and not the page's, and that a deal with a countdown timer gets the same moment of thought as anything else.

Tips for Amazon

Make it stick

Add your country store too, for example amazon.co.uk or amazon.in, as a separate rule.
Allow a 15 minute pause for planned purchases, with a daily limit of one.
Read your pause reasons on the Focus page once a week to spot patterns.

amazon.comBlocking

Sends you to your Focus dashboard

Write a reason. Seeing what you wrote last time is a strong check on impulse buys.

Questions about blocking Amazon

Does this block other Amazon country sites?

Each country uses its own domain, like amazon.de or amazon.co.uk. Add a rule for each one you use.

Can I still check an order or track a package?

Yes, with a short pause. Pick a 5 minute pause length for the rule, write your reason, for example "tracking the charger I ordered", and check the order. If you track orders often, add exceptions for the order pages you use, so tracking stays open while browsing and deals stay blocked.

Does the reason prompt actually stop impulse buys?

It does not forbid anything, and that is the point. It makes you name the purchase before you see the page, and it shows you what you wrote last time. Reading "just browsing" three days in a row is often enough to close the tab. Your reasons stay in your browser and are never sent anywhere.

Will blocking amazon.com also block AWS or Kindle on the web?

It can. A whole site rule covers every subdomain, so aws.amazon.com and other amazon.com subdomains are included. If you use them for work or reading, add them as exceptions on the rule, and shopping stays blocked while those keep working.