**How-To** Amazon Prime Sharing

Ever since I have been doing product reviews, I've used Amazon Prime. That's because most of the products I review are paid for with codes (provided by a product/brand rep) and my shipping is free.

Of course, I also use my Prime membership for other things, especially for gifts for holidays and birthdays. Living in Alaska, I love that I get to shop online for affordable items without worrying about ridiculous shipping and handling fees.

Free shipping would be enough of an incentive to have a Prime membership. The other huge benefit to having Prime is that I can share my account with my household. That's 3 adults and 1 kid. We can get educational games and toys for the child without being limited to the local stores (and local prices), the adults can order clothes, cosmetics, household items and appliances, and some food items. 

Having the luxury of variety, pricing, fast (and free) shipping makes a Prime membership almost a necessity. Split among 3 adults, the membership is affordable and very, very much worth every penny.

The one problem I had with sharing my Prime membership was, well, sharing. This was a big problem during this past Christmas shopping period.

I always knew that I was allowed to share my Prime. What I didn't know is that there is a specific way to share it. What I had been doing was just giving my sign-in information to the other adults in the house. That worked great until we were all trying to surprise each other with Christmas gifts.

After searching the FAQs and forums, I still had no idea of an easier way to share my Prime membership. Apparently, this is a problem a lot of other people were having. I saw other users in the forums wondering at a solution.

This morning, I contacted the Amazon Help center and had a nice chat with a rep named Ben. He directed me to a page that I swear I have never seen before this day! LOL

Here are the directions to setting up a household so that you can properly share your Prime membership (see screenshots below):

1. Go here to access instructions for setting up Amazon Household.
2. You can add a Child or Adult. For Adults, you will need the person with you - or have their information to set up an email, password and billing information.
3. Once you have another Adult account set up, you and the other person should be able to sign in and access your separate information (as far as orders and history, etc.)

It was pretty easy to set up the other adult in our household, but I will have to wait and see how it actually works out. One thing that I noticed is that you have to be willing to "share" some of the billing information in order to share services. This was no problem for me because in our household trust one another. 

I'm curious as to why this information was so hard to find. I know that lots of other users have run into the same problem with finding out how to properly use a shared Prime account. Probably, I wasn't paying attention but, at any rate, things are fixed now.

Peace

--Free