I like some aspects of the new system, including sharing payment methods, and so on. For a typical marriage-like situation, it is wonderful not having to log over to my wife's account to gain other prime benefits (shipping was shared, but things like prime video were not). Now both of our accounts are flagged prime for all purposes as far as I can tell.
That being said, when my kids are older, it would have been nice if we could grant them this stuff also, and as far as I can tell that is not the case. Only the two adults get the prime, while the kids get just the shared digital library.
What's interesting is that Amazon has been doing nice things in the kids department like the "Amazon Allowance."[0] Effectively a parent can give a kid some money, and they can use it on Amazon however they wish. So not being able to grant the kids prime on their account effectively means that a lot of the allowance will wind up going to avoidable postage charges (particularly on smaller orders of sub-$25, which I'd imagine are things an allowance might be utilised on).
I almost don't wonder if Amazon shouldn't change prime in the following way:
- Prime postage is now tied to a physical address (not Amazon Account), regardless of sender (e.g. gifts are now prime eligible).
- The prime account holder gets a certain number of prime "credits" they can use to send prime packages to other physical addresses, like friends and relatives.
Effectively this means if you pay $100/year your address is now Prime flagged. So no matter who sends the item, it gets prime postage. So all household members, or people sending you gifts.
Such a change would be controversial, but it would solve the "household problem" since now whoever lives there gets the prime no matter what their relationship to the account holder or similar.
I really hope they don't go to something like this. I realize I'm not the common use case but I am often ordering things to be delivered to my home, office, inlaws house, etc depending on where I'm going to be on its arrival date and where I need to actually use the item.
Eg in the last couple weeks:
We needed wanted programmable thermostats at the family vacation house, had those sent there so I wouldn't forget them.
Wanted some new pens at the office, had a few packs of Pilot G-2s sent to office.
Needed a new scale for the kitchen since my 10 year old one stopped working, delivered to home.
Kid was staying with grandma for a couple of nights and needed some more diapers, had those sent to her house.
Not all that uncommon for a week or two for me.
If prime locked down to a single address I would seriously consider dropping it and I've been a member and big fan of it pretty much since it launched.
Shipping to multiple addresses is probably pretty common. I frequently send gifts to relatives using my prime account. I'd hate to lose free shipping for those items.
As sibling says, gifts wouldn't be a problem with a "credits" type system, but for someone like me who could ship things to myself at 3+ addresses in a week it would be a no-go unless theres enough credits account for that, which would pretty much make it useless for its purpose of preventing sharing.
Did you see my "prime credits" concept? That would allow you to send those gifts, or if they had a prime themselves you wouldn't need to consume even credits.
I tend to ship mostly to the office, since I live in an apartment, delivery to the door is unreliable and picking up at the office with limited hours is a pain...
YMMV, but agreed that multiple location options is really nice... also, makes sending gifts easier, when it goes where it needs to. I don't use the media stuff much, but I order a lot on amazon, via prime.
This. I spent a couple of weeks working from my mom's house in Oklahoma after she got out of the hospital, and being able to use Prime to order an office chair and a folding table (to use as a proper desk) to be delivered out in the boonies was a godsend.
> Prime postage is now tied to a physical address (not Amazon Account), regardless of sender
This isn't going to go over well. If you think the original Amazon Household was abused, this would be a lot worse. I live in NYC in a small building (no doorman), so I get everything delivered to my office, as do most of my coworkers. If 49/50 of the people working on my floor dropped Prime because we get it from just one person, Amazon won't be happy.
No surprise. Prime was effectively $20/year if you could find four other people to share it with. The only shocking thing is that it took them this long to crack down on it.
I believe Amazon knew about all the sharing that was going on but waited until there was enough users hooked to pull the trigger. An example of another company where people share accounts is Netflix which I think will do something similar to Amazon in the near future.
He has incentives to downplay the problem in public, though. He doesn't want the studios who license their content to Netflix to ask too many questions.
As a studio, you need to ask yourself: Do you want people paying Netflix and possibly sharing accounts? Or would you rather they just pirate it and digital content continues its swan dive to zero value?
Looking forward to see what happens when microSD cards can carry entire studio libraries.
doubtful, I think that if anything the 4K push will really take hold because the media companies want to end sharing as much as possible. A typical high quality movie at 1080p will be 8-15gb in size, and 4x that for 4K... given that HDDs are still looking in the 6-10tb range, I wouldn't expect to ever see that on a microSD card...
We're getting to where there are physical limits to go much smaller as it is in memory, I don't think we'll really see a 10x improvement or more in portable memory to be honest.
I could definitely see that. It can be really effective to sell something at a steep discount to get people hooked, then jack up the price. The problem is that people get upset when you jack up the price. By hiding the discount like this, you can avoid that. People taking advantage of it now will feel like they've just been caught doing something naughty and so will probably be less inclined to complain about it.
How many simultaneous streams are included "free" now? We only watch Netflix on our Roku at home but I think my mother has my Netflix credentials and occasionally watches something. We've never ran into an issue because of simultaneous streaming, AFAIK.
I think the default is 2. I ran into this problem during college since I gave a couple friends my password. One day I was watching and it wouldn't play the next episode since there were 3 streams going at the same time, so I had to upgrade to the $11/4 streams plan. This policy goes back to 2012 IIRC.
It appears you can still share just your free shipping and create a "household" separately. I've have my friends on my Prime account separately from the Household with my wife.
Prime is a sign that Amazon has to some degree given up on the simple business model of just selling stuff with a margin. It's gone from chasing Walmart to chasing Costco, and that's a much smaller market.
That's not to say it doesn't make business sense. The problem is that monetization is now tied to walking the fine line between positive experience and pissing people off...e.g. they have made Prime worse from the customer's perspective. New ways to suck is not a good kind of innovation.
I don't think 'selling stuff with a margin' was ever their business model. In almost every aspect of their business they act as a platform (platform to sell things to consumers, host photos/ music/ etc, watch/ listen/ subscribe to content, AWS). I feel like Prime's goal is to encourage customers to stay within the Amazon ecosystem and although its a revenue stream, it doesn't necessarily mean that 'monetization is now tied to walking the fine line between positive experience and pissing people off'.
I've had Prime for a long time and was surprised to realize I could share shipping with up to 4 people. That just seems to be a big money sink for Amazon, so if they cut back on this I wouldn't call it sucking, I'd call it a smart business move IMO and wouldn't fault them for it.
I didn't even know it was possible until I read this article. My girlfriend (who lives with me) just logs into my Amazon account when she wants to order something so that she get the free two-day shipping.
We have a Roku 3 with the Amazon Instant Video app as well. I've never watched anything through the Amazon app but she does occasionally (again, using my account).
Knowing his will make things a bit easier, I guess, although we had pretty much worked around it just by sharing my account. Had I known, though, I probably would have shared the shipping with my (and perhaps the girlfriend's) parents.
I think your weren't using; won't miss case may be about as good as it gets in terms of customer satisfaction. It's hard to imagine a customer seeing the change as a new feature and getting excited. It's easy to imagine someone who sees the change as an unfavorable alteration of the value proposition.
Most customers are unreasonable and hate it when you take anything away, no matter what it is. Just look at when Netflix dared to raise their already low prices and the hell it caused.
I think in a few years they might limit the free shipping benefit even more. The free 2-day shipping will only be allowed for one, maybe two, shipping addresses. All other addresses would be ineligible. How many people buy for personal and business reasons (two separate shipping addresses) and for family and friends who reimburse the prime member offline (more shipping addresses)?
That being said, when my kids are older, it would have been nice if we could grant them this stuff also, and as far as I can tell that is not the case. Only the two adults get the prime, while the kids get just the shared digital library.
What's interesting is that Amazon has been doing nice things in the kids department like the "Amazon Allowance."[0] Effectively a parent can give a kid some money, and they can use it on Amazon however they wish. So not being able to grant the kids prime on their account effectively means that a lot of the allowance will wind up going to avoidable postage charges (particularly on smaller orders of sub-$25, which I'd imagine are things an allowance might be utilised on).
I almost don't wonder if Amazon shouldn't change prime in the following way:
- Prime postage is now tied to a physical address (not Amazon Account), regardless of sender (e.g. gifts are now prime eligible).
- The prime account holder gets a certain number of prime "credits" they can use to send prime packages to other physical addresses, like friends and relatives.
Effectively this means if you pay $100/year your address is now Prime flagged. So no matter who sends the item, it gets prime postage. So all household members, or people sending you gifts.
Such a change would be controversial, but it would solve the "household problem" since now whoever lives there gets the prime no matter what their relationship to the account holder or similar.
[0] http://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=11453461011