This message from Amazon Mom just landed in our inbox (emphasis mine):
The Amazon Mom program is changing in 2012 and we want to make sure you know about it. Some of these changes affect your membership. Here’s how:
- Starting on January 24, 2012, the maximum discount available on diapers and wipes subscriptions will be 20%. This includes a 5% Subscribe & Save discount plus an additional 15% exclusively for Amazon Mom members who are earning free shipping benefits or have an active Amazon Prime membership.
- Customers who join Amazon Mom in 2012 will get three months of FREE Two-Day Shipping benefits. Once the initial free period is over, customers can join Amazon Prime to continue to receive full access to Amazon Mom and Amazon Prime benefits.
- To continue receiving the Amazon Mom diapers and wipes discount once your free shipping benefits end, you can join Amazon Prime for $79/year.
The big difference (tell me if I’m reading it wrong) is that unless you pay for Prime after three months, you’ll lose the discount on diapers and wipes.
It also says that “if you cancel your Amazon Mom membership before January 24, you will lose the additional 15% Amazon Mom discount on diapers and wipes subscriptions.”
And since they mention joining Amazon Mom in 2012, it looks like they’ll be opening it back up to new members later this winter (though the waitlist page is still up for now). What do you think?
Find the latest and best diaper and wipes deals online and off at BC’s weekly Top Diaper and Formula Deals of the Week posts.
And note that if you have an existing Subscribe and Save subscription with Amazon Mom, you cannot order an extra delivery now or change the next delivery month to January (which I tried to do in order to stock up before January 24th)!
I just went on there earlier because I am in desperate need of an extra shipment of diapers, hadn’t even seen the changes yet, and I was totally confused. Nothing would let me send an extra delivery, even the few items I am already getting only 20% on…
I’m not liking this at all. I am actually getting ready to purchase a student membership for $39, which will be worth it for a few reasons, but I’m going to put that on hold until my free membership is completely over next month to see how this turns out.
I know. I cancelled my subscrbe and save and started a new one. So I could get another box of diapers… I’m debating about doing amazon prime. Sad they are doing this..
I still feel as if I’m getting a better deal with free shipping and no tax ordering through Amazon. I ended up getting a prime membership after my year of free prime through the Amazon Mom ran out. I replaced my BJ’s Club membership with Amazon Prime. It was the same price essentially. I use Amazon for practically everything so the Prime Membership was worth it to me.
$79 seem steep to continue. We use cloth diapers, so thats not a concern, but I order enough products to justify being a member for longer than 3 months. Sounds like they are in it for the money to me.
Of course they’re in it for the money- they’re a business.
The Prime thing was around when I joined in 2010- They did allow you to extend your Prime membership if you ordered things from Amazon for up to a year. My membership is about to expire (in March I think). I’m going to go ahead and pay for Prime though because we’ve ended up becoming very dependent on Amazon (paper towels, toilet paper, wipes, etc) plus Christmas and birthdays general come from their too. Very worth it for our family. Additionally we have Kindles and they have the free library for Prime Members.
Does anyone know how amazon prices with the 5% discount compare with diapers at costco or deals at Walgreens/CVS?
My amazon mom ran out, and I am not sure I want to sign up for amazon prime for $79/year.
I believe amazon is going to see a significant drop in diaper and wipes sales and I hope they go back to the old system.
They still seem to be the cheapest on diapers at least. I can only speak for Luv’s brand, but I can’t find them cheaper for the quantity anywhere else…even with coupons.
We have been paying for Prime for a while. $80 gets you the 2-day shipping, but also includes certain Kindle/ebook downloads, and streaming videos (but not new releases). I have Amazon video set up on our TV, and they have tons of Sesame Street and Bob the Builder so in our house that has made it worthwhile. I agree it sucks that they got rid of that program, definitely did the job of sucking us all in at the beginning with the free shipping and discounts!!!
I think it’s pretty crappy myself. Glad my youngest is getting closer to being out of diapers because I hate the price gouging!
If you are a student (and/or still have a .edu email address), then you can sign up for Amazon Student for $39/year. The only thing different from regular prime is that you don’t have complete access to their online video library for free, and you will receive more promotional emails. I
Well, paying tax adds up each time you purchase something, especially larger items or frequently purchased items. I would think paying $79 per year would still be a deal compared to paying tax on everything you buy when buying in person…
Unless you live in WA state. They’ve got brick-and-morter here, so we pay the tax, too…
Prime has always been $79 , you can add family members to it an split the cost. Of course only the main user gets the streaming and enook loans. I haven’t ordered diapers or wipes in a while, not since they had those awesome coupons. Maybe I will look into it again.
I think that these changes mean that Target with free shipping on all orders over $50 will be the better deal. I checked prices on wipes with my most recent diaper order, and found Target was cheaper by a bit.
I do still have an .edu email address. Will I be able to get 20% off of diapers if I join the Amazon Prime student?
I have a student membership (it was free for me for the first year) and the free period expires in March 2012. I got an email today saying that I would continue to get the benefits of Amazon Mom until that expired and that I could sign up to continue my student prime membership in March for $39 to keep receiving the same benefits.
I commented about this on their FB page, my FB page and chatted with their customer service. I am very upset with this change. We have 1 year old twins and rely heavily on their diapers and discounts. We already began to feel the difference in the reduction of discounts of a max of 30% off on diapers down to 20%. And the loss of earning Prime membership just stinks. I tell everyone, “if it isn’t sold on Amazon it doesn’t exist”. We use Prime shipping for everything. Now, not earning it free and having to go and pay for it??? Ugh, this bites!
To the person who wanted to stock up above. You are right, you cannot use the “extra delivery” option. However, if you go to the product page and order another subscription from there, you can stop up that way. I just got more diapers and wipes this way!
Agreed. This works. I have to do this anyway because we need delivery every three weeks not every month…So you can have multiple subscribe and save orders at one time. Just be sure to manage and cancel them if you’re not needing them all the time!
The bad thing is I could still get my past subscriptions with 30% off up until today. New items only got 20%, but I was still getting 30%. Now if I sign up for a new one for the same thing it will only be 20%. They just effectively eliminated the 30% discount all together.
Very disappointing! Since I joined amazon mom, I’ve done a lot of shopping thru amazon for non-baby things. $79 for a prime membership won’t make financial sense for our family so I guess I’ll go back to couponing for diapers after the current discount runs out. I hope they reconsider this!
Amazon Mom under the old program did run out, I believe you had a year of benefits or so before you had the benefits run out or join prime.
It is well worth the $79 for the reasons listed above by others. The videos are great for young children.
I just bought a car seat this morning with prime. The difference? $25 cheaper than Rus, and instead of leaving the warehouse in two days, I will have it on my doorstep in two days.
Looks like the current subscribe and save orders will continue to receive the discount post-1/24 if you aren’t a prime member.
If your free shipping benefits are over and you have not yet joined Amazon Prime, you will lose the additional 15% Amazon Mom discount on diapers and wipes subscriptions, but will continue to receive your current Subscribe & Save base discount on existing subscriptions. To review your subscriptions, please visit the Your Subscribe & Save Items section in Your Account.
To be honest, this doesn’t surprise me. They REALLY want people to sign up for Prime and seem to be pushing so that the only way you can get any discounts is by signing up. I expect they’ll tighten the screws even more in the future! I am really on the fence about signing up as I like the perks they offer, but $79 is an awful lot.
You can do additional subscriptions, but they’ll only be at the 20% discount threshold, so I might as well wait it out. I had Prime before amazon mom came around, so that doesn’t affect me. What does anger me is that they won’t let you order any additional deliveries between now and then. That feels very dishonest to me. However, I just got out of the chat. I told them that I was having an issue with ordering an extra delivery and she said that if I placed a regular order while we were in the chat, she would honor my S&S discount. So I ordered an extra 2 boxes at the regular rate with my prime shipping, and she went in and manually reduced my total from $76 to $53. So it is possible. If you want to try this, I’d do it quick before “the powers that be” tell their tech support people to not manually honor the 30% discount.
Something else to keep in mind in factoring if the Prime membership is worth it, I also factor in all the money I save from not buying filler items to get me to the $25 threshold for free shipping. If I want one book, I can order that one book without adding an extra $7 to my cart. Another thing is how much money would you save from not running into Target for that one thing and then end up with half a cart of things you might need but not really? When was the last time you left with buying ONLY the one thing you ran in to get? It makes impulse buying more of a danger, but it’s still worth it for me.
I agree, I’m about to sign up for the prime. $79 a year is only $6.58 a month. I really miss my two day shiping, and I agree everytime I go to target I buy way more crap than I need. Plus I work full time and running to Target takes more time that I could be doing something else. I’m pretty sure I spend $79 a year in sales tax to make it worth it.
Become a fan of Amazon student on facebook. Once a year (usually September) they offer a free years prime membership if you have an active .edu email. Each year as it expires, I change my account to another email, close the account, then reopen a new account with my .edu email. I have had free prime for 3 years now
My boyfriend is a member of amazon prime,has been for abut two years now,the 79 may seem kind of high but due to the fact as long as an item is Prime eliagible,we have free shipping or FREE over night shipping,it really is worth it
You can put in up to two more email addresses under your prime membership. In this way, if you found two other friends to split it with you, you could divide the $79 cost three ways! This is what I do with my mom and a friend!
It works PERFECTLY 
And being a mom of a 3 year old….shopping on amazon is SO much less stressful. 
I already signed up for prime when my free membership ended but what’s really making me mad is they keep changing the discount. From what I can tell this also means that all the previous subscribe and save we were still getting 30% discount for will now be dropping to 20% also. And they aren’t even letting you place extra deliveries, which really messes things up for people who really need them! Grrrr. It’s enough to make me want to cancel prime and start getting diapers and wipes from somewhere else. I tried to go on chat and they were no help at all, didn’t offer to place order and fix like the person above.
I played dumb and didn’t mention the 30% or that I was ordering diapers. All I said was, “Hi, I’m having trouble placing an order for an extra delivery with my S&S. Can you help me?” And she said she’d manually do the adjustment without asking what it was I was trying to order. So maybe that helps?
I will wait and see, but if they start tightening down current subscriptions from 30% to 20% after 1/24, I’ll probably go back to buying diapers at Costco: we’re already paying a membership fee there anyway, and I can at least earn a rebate at the end of the year… Might as well, if the prices become a wash (oh, and btw, I live in WA, so Amazon charges me for taxes, hence I don’t save as much as some of you do to begin with).
So, I guess you could make up new email addresses every 3 months to still get the 20% discount? Do you think they’ll cross-ref names & addresses?
We jumped in on Prime last fall when our free trial ran out. We got so hooked on the free shipping. I am disappointed that the discount is dropping, but the convenience is still worth it for me (working mom of 2). With the paid prime, I believe you can add 3 or 4 different family members (we have only added 2). Ours each chipped in $20 as they feel that is well worth it for free Amazon shipping for a year. So our part stands at $40 out of pocket with the benefits of the kindle and video lending (which we use). We love being able to count on our purchases in 2 days…. it takes us that long to get the other arranged to watch the kids for a trip to the store anyway.
I was able to get an extra delivery in (with my current subscription at 30%) by changing the delivery date to Jan 19th!! Please ladies, get your extra delivery in before it is too late. Change the delivery date link is at the top of your subscriptions page.
I couldn’t change it earlier than February. 8-( They must have caught this loophole.
Even with my BJ’s membership fee and tax my pampers cruisers are cheaper at BJ’s. They are $42 a box with a $5 coupon from BJ’s and a $2 pampers coupon they end up being several dollars cheaper than getting them from amazon and if I had to pay the $79 then I’m getting them almost $10 cheaper. Not good amazon….you just lot a customer.