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Written by Omie Ismail
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Tuesday, 29 December 2009 07:14 |
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Page 2 of 2
The second case of sharing with friends or people you don't know, is simply stealing from Amazon. However, the practice seems fairly widespread. Many people will hock their unused spots on Amazon Prime utilizing a service like PayPal to make the payment. The general method is posting on a forum and utilizing private messages to complete the transaction. While Amazon states clearly that they can cancel Prime memberships for violations of its terms and conditions, there appear to be very few instances of cancellations. The instances of cancellations seem to be focused on resellers that purchase high volumes of products from Amazon with no shipping costs and sell them to their customers. So the claims by people that Prime is great because it only costs them $15.80 are similar to those that consider a $200 stock newsletter cheap because they share it with 5 of their friends. The difference is that the cost that Amazon pays to its shipping partners is real and multiplied 5 fold when people do this.
So while splitting the cost of Amazon Prime could theoretically lower your cost, in practice if it does, you probably are sharing it with your extended family or you are violating Amazon's terms and conditions with friends or people you don't know. Amazon doesn't seem to stress enforcement of the non-household sharing of Amazon Prime. My guess is that they are happy to have the additional sales revenue even if they are paying more for the shipping. And since Amazon often has higher prices than their partner vendors without free shipping, they are probably still making decent margins for anything that costs more than $25. Does that make it right, no, it's still stealing.
And does splitting Amazon Prime mean that I am going to sign up tomorrow? Nope. I have been getting along just fine with my 1 to 3 day free shipping from Amazon for free. Even got a Saturday delivery via USPS which doesn't happen with Prime.
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