It took a long time. Free trials. Free with Amazon Mom purchases. More free trials. But today, my wife and I finally decided to pay for Amazon Prime.
It was all for the shipping, really. Whenever we’ve had Prime, it’s fundamentally changed the way we shop. Need an air filter for the car? Amazon Prime. Need probiotics for the dog? Amazon Prime. Need an oddball cable? Amazon Prime.
The streaming and book lending features are nice, but I can’t envision us using them very much. One thing that’s kind of sucky is the restrictions with said features: my wife is the “owner” of the Prime account and I’m a guest; since I’m a guest, I can’t stream nor get a free Kindle book. I too would have to pay $79/year for that. And really, that’s not worth it to me – I use and love Netflix.
So yeah. Amazon has won.
Posted in Consumer Commentary
Cat November 16, 2011, 8:17 pm
One warning: Amazon uses Ontrac for most of their Prime shipping now. I don’t know how it is in Chicago, but they are scary-awful in a lot of places. I took my Prime off auto-renew because of it, and will seriously consider not re-upping next time. Since Bill and I have Kindles, we don’t use the shipping option as much.
Paul November 16, 2011, 9:07 pm
I’ve had a couple of local shippers used for Prime stuff in the past, and I’ve had no problems. So far.
Paul December 8, 2011, 10:09 am
And now, one problem from Ensenda: an item I ordered never made it to the house. Amazon resent it with one-day shipping, presumably from UPS, so we’ll see.