How to Lessen Your Amazon Prime Cost
I was recently chatting with a friend about the benefits of Amazon Prime and how nice the free 2 day shipping benefit really is. After all, you can have toilet paper delivered to your front doorstep within days, your favorite miracle night cream shipped for free right to you at a great price and gifts for the kids’ upcoming birthday parties shipped right to you without having to leave the house and make that one extra stop with the limited time that we all seem to have.
As we were talking she mentioned how she was skipping from email address to email address to take advantage of the free 30 day Amazon Prime trial to get her through the holidays, as we have to recognize that the Amazon Prime membership cost has definitely gone up these last couple years.
Ding, ding, ding. “Hello, Kate… tell her that she can go on her family members Prime account for free” I thought to myself. So, we began talking about family members that have an Amazon Prime membership and her parents do indeed have one. Awesome!
Cut your Amazon Prime Cost by Sharing an Account!
So, I set out to write a post on just how easy it is to share an Amazon Prime account with a family member. Here’s how, step-by-step to share your Amazon Prime account free 2-day shipping benefits with one other person and four children in your household.
- Go to Amazon.com and sign into your account (or the person who pays for the Amazon Prime account if that’s not you)
- Next, click on “Your Account” in the upper-right corner of the web page
- Scroll down and click on “Manage Your Household”
- Press “add adult” and add the required information
** In the past Amazon allowed the Amazon Prime accountholder to add up to four additional household members by inviting them. They have changed the program to be titled “Amazon Household” where you can now have two adults on an account that share the wallet and up to four kids on the account (that can’t make purchases).
The following Prime benefits can be shared between the two adults in the “Amazon Household”:
- Fast & FREE Prime Shipping benefits
Access to Prime Video (streaming only)
Early access to Amazon Lightning Deals
Prime Photos (each household adult is eligible for their own personal Prime Photos account – actual photos and albums aren’t shared between accounts)
Kindle Owners’ Lending Library
20% off diapers subscriptions and 15% off Baby Registry discounts, compliments of Amazon Family
Fresh shipping benefits (for Prime Fresh members only) - You can also create a family library to share books, apps, and games with the other adult in your Household on their Amazon devices and media apps.
And, household adults can manage parental controls with Amazon FreeTime for the children and use multi-profiles on Amazon devices to personalize your device experience.
It’s really that simple to share an Amazon Prime membership account, shop for Prime eligible items and receive free two-day shipping without being the owner of an Amazon Prime membership.
A few things to note about sharing an Amazon Prime Account:
You’ll need to have the regular $99 per year Prime membership, as a student Prime membership can’t be shared. But, students get a 6 month Amazon Prime trial membership for free and this definitely helps cut the cost of the Amazon Prime price!
I know this is a change from the way that Amazon used to allow Amazon Prime members to share accounts, but the nice thing is that both adults in the “household” can access many more of the Prime benefits than what the program allowed previously.
I’d love to know what you think! Is it still worth sharing Amazon Prime accounts or will you just get your own account?
See my post on 15 Things You Should be Buying on Amazon.
