It’s Now Harder To Share Your Amazon Prime Benefits: New Limits Restrict

You might not have know that you could share your Amazon Prime account benefits like the free shipping and streaming video with your friends, but you could.

The other adult can add their own debit or credit card to the account but the payment method will be visible to both people who share a Prime account, Amazon has made this a mandatory requirement for sharing Prime accounts.

If you take advantage of enough of those services, the $99 per year fee can pay for itself in no time. Now you can only share with one other adult… but you can create an “Amazon Household” with 2 adults and 4 children sharing some of those features. You used to be able to share benefits with up to four other adults. So, if you were sharing your Prime shipping benefits with a roommate or partner, that arrangement will still be in place, and they won’t suddenly have access to your credit cards. The kids on the other hand are limited in what they get out of the deal.

Amazon prohibits the practice: under “other limitations” in Prime terms: “Prime members are not permitted to purchase products for the objective of resale, rental, or to ship to their customers or potential customers using Prime benefits”. The change appears to apply to new people using the feature; if you’ve been sharing your benefits for a while, you should be unaffected. This means your spouse may be able to use your credit card to make purchases from Amazon using your card, or vice versa.

Under the new program, called Amazon Households, Amazon Prime benefits including free shipping and Prime Instant Video can be shared among six people in a household – but that consists of just two adults and four children, according to the company. So, if you were planning to add someone to your plan, keep in mind that sharing your Prime benefits now is a much different affair than it was a week ago.