Amazon Prime Sharing About to Get Stricter With New Rules

August 6, 2015         By: Steven Anderson

Amazon Prime memberships used to make quite a bit of sense, especially if you had a few like-minded folks around willing to take a slice of the cost and take advantage of the benefits.

Indeed, Amazon even supported this somewhat, allowing Prime members to share the account benefits—including the free two-day shipping and the Prime Instant Video streaming options—with up to four other members. However, some new changes at Amazon are quietly putting the kibosh on some of that.

Now, the previous Prime shipping option is part of the current Amazon Households program, which in turn limits the sharing to members of the household, including six members: two adults, and up to four children.

Additionally, the fringe benefit of using a small business’ Amazon Prime account seems to also be gone, requiring businesses to join the Amazon Business Program instead to get the Prime-style benefits.

In the earlier days of the program, all a user needed to join in the benefits was to know the user’s birth day and month to accept an invitation. Now, to share Prime benefits, account holders need to authorize each other to use payment methods.

Reports suggest that Prime customers aren’t exactly happy with this new development, as Slickdeals forums have seen more than a few disgruntled Prime members talking about the deal in less-than-glowing terms.

It’s a safe bet that Amazon did this in a bid to get more users on with their own, purchased program rather than piggybacking off someone else’s program. That ups the numbers of paid users and gets more cash coming into Amazon’s coffers, a development it’s likely to need.

Now that users have had a chance to get interested, it might be just what Amazon needs to draw in more paying customers; it likely won’t be a one-to-one conversion—more than a few will likely think something like “it’s good, but not pay for it good” or “the nerve of them, making me pay for this!” and stay out of the program—but it’s likely to mean an increase all the same.

Amazon Prime is a pretty smart idea, especially for those who routinely shop Amazon in large amounts—I once priced a load of used DVD’s and discovered that the shipping costs were almost as much as it would have cost for the DVD’s themselves—and want to save on shipping as well as get access to a solid streaming service. The new rules may end up doing a bit of damage to Amazon’s perception…though it might also pull in some new customers in the process.