9 Extra Perks You Can Get By Joining Amazon Prime

Prime members have access to Amazon’s Prime Rewards Visa Signature Card which rewards you for shopping. The card gives members 5% back for any Amazon.com or Whole Foods purchases and provides 2% back for purchases at restaurants, gas stations, and all local transit and commuting payments, including rideshare apps. Meanwhile, regular everyday purchases are included as well, with Amazon providing 1% back for every other purchase you make with the card.

This feature gives bibliophiles another way to download their favorite titles or dive into their to-be-read piles through Amazon’s collection of more than 3,000 included digital books, audiobooks, comics, and more.

As another aside to Prime Reading, Amazon offers its First Reads option to Prime members, giving them early access to newly released books. Each month, the Prime member can download one newly released book from a curated selection of editor’s picks titles. But with Amazon’s October Prime Day event, the company is also offering Prime members two free Kindle books instead of just one.

Amazon First Reads offers numerous book genres including suspense, gothic historical fiction, romance, short stories, and many others. October’s book choices include Recipe for Second Chances by Ali Rosen, All the Little Raindrops by Mia Sheridan, and for younger readers: The Night Raven by Johan Rundberg.

Shopping for clothes online has become the mainstream alternative to physically going to a store but adds the risk that the item doesn’t fit or suit your style. To combat this problem, Amazon introduced a “Try Before You Buy” perk in 2017.

Prime members can order items including clothing, shoes, and accessories, and have seven days to try on the items before returning the ones you don’t like at no cost to you.

Cooper Smith, then-director of Amazon IQ Research at Gartner L2 told USA Today in 2018 that the feature was important for Prime customers who don’t want to trek to a store and could help the company sell more high-priced fashion items. Amazon has “been selling a lot of clothing, but they haven’t been able to sell fashion,” Smith told the outlet. “Fashion brands want to reach Prime users.”

With Amazon Music Prime, members can stream not only music, but podcasts as well, to your tablet, phone, or any other smart device. It removes the need to pay extra for ad-free music streaming services, although the catalog is playlist-based and limited compared to services like Spotify.

To get access to the full catalog of more than 100 million songs, you can add Amazon Music Unlimited for an extra $10/month.

Storing your photos has never been easier since Amazon launched its Photos option, giving members access to unlimited full-resolution photo storage and providing 5 GB of video storage. Amazon will make on-demand cards, photo books and other prints from your photos for an additional fee.

A major benefit to Amazon’s Prime membership is its Grubhub+ deal which gives members a one-year membership trial to the food delivery service. By using Grubhub+, Prime members will get unlimited $0 delivery fees for orders costing more than $12.

The Grubhub+ membership usually costs $9.99 per month, but with the Prime membership, that first year is completely free.

For Amazon Prime members, the Prime Gaming option offers access to free games and in-game content every month. The company also allows gamers to play a rotating selection of free games on its cloud gaming service, Luna.

Prime Gaming also offers a free monthly channel subscription on Twitch.tv.

Sure there are a lot of perks that come with a Prime membership, but why keep them all to yourself? Membership Sharing allows a family to share just one Prime membership with two adults, four teens, and four kids under the age of 13. This feature will give every family member access to all Amazon perks like Prime Reading and Prime Gaming.

Amazon launched Membership Sharing back in March as a way “to share these benefits and digital content with the people you love,” the company said in a press release.