WTF is up with Amazon Prime lately?

I didn’t know about it either. 0.5% to the EFF!

I signed up for Prime late fall / early winter exclusively for streaming video. Not a single other purchase so far.

Everything Woolen said is true. Finding anything is a pain. Results returned and recommendations include both titles bundled with the subscription and titles that need to be bought. I’m not interested in buying digital video (bluray for a permanent copy) and consider titles with extra cost to be pollution of search results. And the “watchlist” is inelegant compared with Netflix’s queue.

If they raise prices especially near to or greater than Netflix I’ll re-evaluate if Prime is worth it.

Summed up: for streaming video Prime has certain titles not available on Netflix but the user experience sucks. Like WH said it’s a general purpose webstore shoe horned into providing video.

My biggest complaint early on was that Amazon was desperate to inflate the size of its offerings. So instead of having 1 big icon for, say, Gray’s Anatomy, they called out each individual season with its own big icon. So you’re flipping through the offerings and getting the same 3-4 TV shows over and over again, only different seasons for each one.

I think that if they’re feeling pricing pressure, one of the first things they need to do is introduce higher-priced family plans if you’re going to share your Prime with 3-4 people. That’s sort of ridiculous that one person pays the same that 3-4 people sharing an account do. And it would seem fair.

Not Prime, but my order on Bravely Default was 5-7 days for Standard Shipping (3-5 days). I switched it to free and gained one day on the estimated delivery. Yeah, I’ll save my $5 for one day, thanks.

Netflix did separate season listings for shows for years. I think it’s just growing pains. And actually charging to share with family would make sense but it seems like they want to sell you on the benefits of Prime by hooking you through sharing, then get you to upgrade to your own primary account via the streaming/Kindle Book/etc programs.

Protip: Use adblock on the PURCHASE video button so you don’t accidentally buy an entire season that’s available for free on prime. There’s no refunds.

At the time things were organized mostly for disc rentals in which case that makes sense.

Saw some weird pricing yesterday.

Book was $18 with free 2 day Prime shipping. Listed “3rd party” shipper had it for $3 plus $3.99 shipping. I don’t need it in two days that badly…

I don’t think that that’s all that uncommon of a scenario. Amazon handles a huge amount of 3rd party sales.

It appears that they’ve changed the default price-showing behavior, however.

In Ye Olde Tymes, when I visited an item’s page, it would, by default, show it to me from the seller whose combined price and shipping were the overall cheapest–regardless of whether or not the seller was Amazon, a “Fulfilled by Amazon” dealer, or a true third-party.

Now, if there’s any seller offering Prime, it will show the cheapest one out of those that do, even if there’s a non-Prime offer that’s cheaper. It alerts you to this fact with somewhat small, easy-to-miss text, and I’m not entirely pleased by the change.

It’s official: Prime is going up to $99, which is a weird figure because it’s a non-Prime number. (97 was available, and 101, but triple digits would probably bust a psychological barrier.) Fuel costs are to blame.

If you live in Seattle, NYC, or San Fran, for $299, you can get Prime Fresh, which is free same-day or next-day delivery on orders over $35.

Wonder how that will impact the student edition. . .

iirc, the student edition is $49 in the new pricing model

I would be just fine if they dropped video streaming and knocked $10 off.

My knee-jerk reaction is to cancel my Prime membership, but then I think: I’m spending $4k a year at Amazon. $100 of that is 2.5%. I could probably get free regular shipping on almost all of that, so shipping cost is a non-issue, but the stuff will arrive, like, next month. At least, that’s my vague memory of Amazon pre-Prime, that they’d sit on an order for weeks, and then it would take another 10 days to show up.

Smartest thing to do is probably to turn off auto-renewal, and then see how painful it is to live without it. Maybe it’s not as bad as I remember.

EDIT: OK, you can’t turn off auto-renewal. You can end membership, but you can’t say “let it expire.”

Weird. For my student account I got an email informing me of the price increase and telling me to go click on the “Continue membership” button if I wanted it to continue (and, lo! there was such a thing! and mightily did I click on it!) otherwise my sub would be ending at whatever previously-known date. Must be a student-specific thing?

I am pretty sure the $20 price increase is way less than it would cost me in gas to travel and pick up all the stuff I order, yet alone the time saved.

Well, that’s the thing. It’s entirely about time saved. You could order all that stuff and get free super saver shipping, so you’re not driving to pick it up, and it wouldn’t cost you anything but time waiting. A lot of time. Not because 2 day is fast, but because Amazon dawdles when you don’t have Prime.

Perhaps you’re saying that you buy stuff with Prime that is somewhat time-sensitive. Not so time sensitive that you need to buy it today, but time sensitive enough that you’d go out to a store if you had to wait 3 weeks for it to arrive. Looking at the stuff I’ve bought, I think about 20% of the items fall into that category.

Bleh, ordered two boxes worth of items from Amazon Prime and paid extra for one day shippping, USPS left one box and marked both ‘delivered’. They do seem to use USPS more and more which sucks because I tend to have nothing but problems with USPS when it comes to package delivery.

This hasn’t happened to me with an Amazon order in quite some time and I’m dismayed to see they’ve really hidden the “Where’s My Stuff?” customer service page; it still mostly exists but its like 8 levels deep now when it used to be a one-click thing.

Remember that Prime can be extended to as many as four Amazon accounts if the other three don’t care about video streaming/the lending library/etc. $25/person for a year’s worth of free two day shipping at one of the most comprehensive one stop shops imaginable is pretty darn cheap.

(It also means I’m not actually paying for my Prime at the moment so my mom is the one that gets to decide if she cares about the extra $20.)