Amazon sneaked in a quiet change to Amazon Prime benefits this month. Previously you could share your Amazon Prime benefits with up to four related adults, now that’s been reduced to sharing benefits with one other adult.
If you’ve already enabled Amazon Prime sharing it looks like you can continue – at least until your renewal date, but don’t remove anyone from your account as you won’t be able to add them back in later. Crucially you need to realise that whoever you share your Amazon Prime benefits with will be authorised to use your credit or debit card on file. However as a bonus you’ll also be authorised to use theirs which they may or may not be happy to agree with!
Benefits that can now be shared are delivery benefits, Prime Instant Video (streaming only), Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, and Prime Early Access.
What this means is that if you share your Amazon Prime Video benefits with anyone in the future you’re also authorising them to make additional purchases using your payment card. That’s probably incentive enough for most people other than wives, husbands or partners.
Amazon has effectively positioned Prime as a family sharing benefit and just about eliminated more casual households from liberally sharing Prime. For instance if a group of Uni Students are sharing a house, rather than one sign up for Amazon Prime and split the cost they’d be much safer individually signing up for Amazon Student than authorising debit card payments with the danger that their college chums could empty their bank account.
Realistically Amazon Prime sharing has now for all intents and purposes been replaced by Amazon Household where two adults share the benefits and can authorise up to four children who don’t need their own Amazon account.
