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Amazon Cuts Down On Prime Sharing
An anonymous reader writes: Tech Crunch reports that Amazon quietly rolled out changes to how their Prime subscriptions can be shared. The good news is that existing members aren't immediately losing their current sharing setups. It used to be that Amazon would let Prime subscribers share free shipping and a few other benefits with up to four other "household" members, with little restriction on what counted as a "household." The bad news: as of last weekend, Amazon now limits sharing to one other adult and four "child" profiles. The adults will need to authorize each other to use credit/debit cards associated with the account. Amazon didn't make any announcement about this, so it's unknown how long existing Prime shares will stay in effect. They could disappear when the subscription is up for renewal, or earlier if Amazon decides to crack down on it.
Our household spends a lot of money on Amazon, but we are not going to renew Prime this year. I ahve been rodering thing from Amazon since the 90s but my satisfaction level with the company peaked a couple years ago adn has been sliding down since. The reasons we are cancelling are varied:
- Items listed as having Prime often do not arrive for 5-6 business days. This is typical for larger items. It annoys me that Amazon lists tham as prime (to me this means item will arrive 2-3 business days), and their practice of having fine print about extra handling time for some prime items is abrasive. Just don't list it as Prime if it won't be shipped for 3-4 days!
- The streaming video options are weak and I don't like the picture quality
- "Prime day" is a joke
- They raised the annual price of Prime 3x since I signed up
- Items shipped prime from Amazon have shown up obivously used or broken multiple many times over the past year (much more often than before)
- Amazon's support people were really hard to deal with when things in the above bullet point happened
- As far as I can tell "super saver" shipping usually only takes one additional day (and sometimes none) to arrive compared to prime
- I have been finding better prices on many things from retailers like Costco and Walmart compared to what Amazon offers
- Amazon uses a variety of tactics to make the camelcamlcamel plugin not work relably to show price history on an item.
Maybe I will regret the decision and we will sign back up, but we are definitely going to try living without it.