Amazon.com Prime

(Disclaimer: This post is intended to be informative, but I also am part of the Amazon.com associates programs, so I do get credit for any sales when you click these Amazon.com links. If you don't like me, don't follow the links. I do have Amazon.com Prime service. I like it and use it frequently.)

I always liked shopping at Amazon.com. Back in the mid 90's I thought it would be awesome to be able to go to one website and order anything you needed. Amazon at that time sold mostly books. Back then e-commerce was in its infancy, you could not find everything that you wanted, search engines were slow and less accurate and web pages were just text with no video being viewable over slow dial-up modems.

So fast forward to today. Google indexes over 1 billion web pages, every page now seems to contain video and flash animation, and e-commerce is booming. Amazon.com now sells almost everything. But the the biggest down fall of ordering online is shipping costs. Some places cost shipping & handling fees that cost more than the product.

So when gas prices started to rise it made even more sense to shop online, but I hated the high shipping costs. I saw an advertisement about the Amazon.com program where, for a yearly fee, you get free 2 day shipping, and 3.99 for one-day. Being a frequent shopper to the website, I read about it and decided to try it.

Now every deal has its problems. The only two issues I found are:

- The yearly cost is a little high, 80 bucks a year. Amazon.com is offering a free month trial, but make sure that you use the service to get your money out of it.

- The free 2-day shipping only applies to Amazon.com-sold products. These means you still pay shipping with third-party sellers.

This service has been very useful, especially when gas prices were so high this summer. At the highest point in gas prices, it would cost us 10 dollars in gas to go to the local Target, but with free shipping through Amazon.com , we only had to wait a day or two.