I have been a lover of Amazon for a long time.
I have also been a member of Amazon Prime for a long time. Amazon Prime has always been a good deal, but Amazon keeps finding little ways to make this deal better and better.
What is Amazon Prime?
Amazon Prime started as a fairly simple concept. It was a way for Amazon to reward their loyal customers. For a flat fee ( $79) you can get 100% free shipping on all Amazon products. Not only that, but it would be free two-day shipping.
But wait…it was even better than that. There was no minimum amount required for purchase. This may seem like a small thing. But it is actually huge.
Let’s say you buy a widget that costs $.99. With Prime, Amazon will ship to you for free. The shipping alone on any product is likely to run far more than the entire purchase price of the item when you’re talking these cheap items. Without Amazon Prime, getting your widget may end up costing you $.99 +2 dollars shipping and handling (or more). Due to Amazon Prime this turns into quite a nice savings.
For anyone who makes more than a handful of Amazon purchases throughout the year this is instantly a valuable resource. I personally invested in Amazon Prime membership when that was absolutely all that it offered, and thought I was getting away with a wonderful deal.
But Amazon was not even close to being done.
Next Amazon began to ink deals with many major television and movie studios allowing them to show all sorts of free television programs and videos. While these shows and videos may be anywhere from $.99 to $5.99 per view for non-Amazon Prime members, the over 20,000 TV and streaming videos are now offered 100% free to Amazon Prime members.
Even better than that, Amazon is working daily to add to this list. Just last week heaps of new shows and deals were sealed for Amazon, almost doubling the previous amount that had been offered. This part of the service keeps getting better and better.
But Amazon still was not close to being done.
One of the major desires for Amazon is that their Kindle fire tablet and Kindle e-book readers do well. So they created a way to reward both the Amazon Prime members who are also Kindle Owners. Already Amazon offers thousands of 100% free e-books to anyone. Even without a prime membership. But they wanted more for these Kindle Owner/Prime Members.
So Amazon enters a new chapter is ebook sharing. Your prime membership will be linked to your Kindle device. Through this device you will now be able to “borrow” books from other users.
It works like this: Person A buys a book from Amazon. Then enabling it sharing. Amazon will then allow any Prime member to read a book 100% free. The lender need never do another thing and the user has the book as long as they want to. Finding if the book you want is available is easy from the Kindle too. There is a nice easy “search’ function.
The only stipulations are that this is limited to one “borrow” a month and once you get a new “borrow” your previous one be deleted.
So what this really works out to is 1 free book a month to read. Let’s say you purchased one new book a month rather than getting it for free through Amazon ebook lending, to make the math simple, let’s say you got these books at the price of $9.99 each. That would mean that this feature alone is worth $120 a year. $40 more than you pay for Amazon Prime.
Again, this feature alone makes Amazon Prime worth the money for anyone who is an avid reader.
What is Next for Amazon Prime
This makes me wonder what is next for Amazon prime membership. What tricks does Amazon have up its sleeve for us all. Free rental terms on new music? Some other sort of special discount? Deals only for Members? Who knows.
One thing is for sure, Amazon has proven that they care about the Amazon prime membership and they are always looking for ways to improve the value of the Prime member, and they have done all this without even altering the inexpensive $79 membership fee.
Find out more about becoming an Amazon Prime Member.
