News Beat
I’ve paid for Amazon Prime for a decade and this is what I’ve learned
The main benefit of Amazon Prime is shipping. Prime members get unlimited premium delivery, with next-day or sometimes even same-day options, available seven days a week. This is free if the order is over £20, or £1.99 if it’s under, but shipping would cost £4.99 without Prime.
On the shopping front, you also get early access to Amazon’s Lightning Deals with the Prime membership, a year of Deliveroo Plus Silver, Prime exclusive discounts and grocery deliveries in certain postcodes, which are provided by Amazon Fresh, Morrisons, Co-Op or Iceland.
For frequent shoppers, the Prime membership cost may have already paid for itself, but there are entertainment perks to consider, too. Prime Video, with thousands of popular movies and TV shows, usually costs £5.99 on its own but is included with Prime.
So is Amazon Music, which offers over 100 million songs ad-free, Prime Reading which provides thousands of books and magazines, and Prime Gaming which offers free PC games each month. There’s also Prime Gaming Luna that allows you to stream a selection of games from the cloud.
Speaking of the cloud, also included is Amazon Photos, which lets you store unlimited full-resolution photos and 5GB of video.
The above are the main advantages currently, but another one is coming soon for those who own an Echo speaker or display, such as the Echo Dot or Echo Show. Amazon announced that its generative AI-based Alexa upgrade will be free to Prime users, but a paid extra for everyone else. However, this is currently only available in the US.
