It came out of nowhere, but it seems that Amazon.com has silently earned all of my shopping business – almost regardless of what the product is.

It started a few years ago when I first became an Amazon Prime member to get free 2-day shipping on almost everything the site sells. At first I did it just because the $80 yearly cost was going to be less than the total shipping cots of my Christmas gift purchases, but I’ve renewed every year since.

No matter what product I need, I look to Amazon first to see if I can get it shipped via UPS 2-day free of charge via my Prime membership.

The next thing that happened was digital music. Amazon has made a nearly flawless experience to order and download digital music and have it instantly show up in my iTunes account – easily synced to my iPod and iPhone. It’s less expensive than buying through iTunes, and the files you download are MP3s instead of iTunes’ restricted files.

Last week, I received my Kindle 2 – Amazon’s digital book reader device. I can now buy a book for under $10 and have it ready to read in my hands just seconds later.

I had heard people say that they read much more now that they own a Kindle, and that they would never go back to reading books. As a paper-lover, I wasn’t sure. But now that I have one, I can see very easily where they’re coming from. The ease of finding, buying, and reading with the Kindle is unlike anything I’ve experienced yet in this digital world.

For Christmas, Mandi and I got ourselves a Roku box and a Netflix account. We can now watch thousands of movies on-demand from Netflix, although many of the titles are older ones. Then, last week, a little surprise awaited us… Amazon is now delivering movies directly to Roku boxes across the world.

So in addition to watching our Netflix movies instantly, we now have access to a complete library of new releases for digital rental through Amazon.

Free shipping on almost any product, all of my music, all of my books and magazines, all of my music, and almost all of my movie rentals… all through Amazon.

If they ever go under, I don’t know how I would survive. Sad, but true.