Now that we're in the Holiday shopping season, that means you will be buying presents.
Amazon is one of the biggest players when it comes to online shopping. You can find just about anything you want and for a competitive price, but what about the shipping cost?
With Amazon you can buy their Prime Membership for $99 per year and get 2-day free shipping on a ton of qualified items. But is Prime Membership worth it?
You get 2-day free shipping on most of the products they sell. The free 2-day shipping is unlimited. On some items (not many) you may see "Add-on 2-day shipping." That means you have to order a minimum dollar amount in order to get free 2-day shipping for that item.
So let’s say you order stuff from Amazon twice a month without a Prime Membership. If you spend a minimum of $35 in your order you get free shipping. If you don’t, the shipping cost can vary in price depending on where the item is shipping from and the weight of the package.
But, just to give you an idea, let’s say you order from Amazon twice a month and each item costs you $5 for shipping. So multiply $5 times 24 orders over a year and that equals $120 you will spend on shipping. So that alone can be worth the investment of a Prime Membership. Although I have read that people who have an Amazon Prime Membership tend to order stuff way more and I have to admit I am one of them.
If you don’t order a lot of stuff from Amazon, the Prime Membership may not benefit you for the 2-day free shipping. But let’s take a look and see what else you get with your $99 membership.
You also get unlimited streaming of thousands and thousands of movies and TV episodes, plus you can listen to stream music through Amazon’s Prime music and it's ad-free. They even have pre-selected playlists to choose from. But wait there is more; you can borrow one free Kindle book a month from their lending library.
Oh yes, and you can upload and store an unlimited amount of your photos for free on Amazon Cloud.
Last but not least, to help with getting those very popular Amazon Lightning deals, Prime Members get access 30 minutes before non-members.
My suggestion is to try it before you buy it and see if spending the $99 is worth it.
You can try out their Prime Membership for 30 days for free just remember to cancel before 30 days. If you don’t, they will charge your credit card after the free trial.
I do a ton of online shopping from Amazon and I use all of the perks that come with it so for me this is a no brainer to spend the $99 annual membership fee. If you are a student and can prove it with your “.EDU” email you can get your Student Prime Membership for $49 half the cost.
You can also try their Student Prime Membership for 6 months.
Bottom-line you have to decide if it's worth it. If you are a seasonal online shopper try Freeshipping.org. This website list several online retailers who are offering free shipping deals.