Never again run out of household items

Amazon Subscribe and Save was mentioned in the Cybernet News RSS feed and it sounded that interesting that I decided to take a look at it myself and write a small article about it. The service offers a way to subscribe to household items and select a delivery schedule for those items. Shipping is free of charge and buyers do get a 15% discount on purchased items.

Even better that you can cancel the service at anytime. It is a bit sad that this service is currently only available on Amazon.com but it could happen that the localized Amazon portals in other countries will follow the lead if the service turns out to be a success.

What I like is that you do get a 15% discount and that the items are shipped freely to your location. This could be especially useful for household items that you use on a daily basis. Amazon offers five main categories that hold items, those are: Baby & Child Care, Food & Snacks, Health & Wellness, Household Supplies and Personal Care & Beauty.

The benefit of using a service like this is that you do not have to think of buying an item when you are running out of supplies. I’m not saying that you will never again run into a situation where you are running out of toilet paper or coffee because you still have to select a schedule for the delivery.

The danger that I see is that it could happen that you get either to many items delivered or to few. It probably will take some time until you set the right schedule for the household items. Most items seem to come in packages of two or more which explains the pricing. It did look a bit high on first glance but considering that you do sometimes get 2,3 or even 4 items for that price it sounds reasonable again.

Related Articles:

Author: Martin Brinkmann, Wednesday November 28, 2007 -
Tags:amazon, amazon tips, web services

Responses so far:

1. Kris says:

   November 28, 2007 at 12:47 pm

   The Amazon site doesn’t say what happens in the event that the recipient becomes deceased and the spouse doesn’t have the account password.. I’m sure that the recipient’s spouse wouldn’t want to keep receiving twice the groceries s/he needs.

   Reply
2. Martin says:

   November 28, 2007 at 1:03 pm

   Kris I suppose this could be dealt with by contacting the Amazon support. It is basically the same thing with subscriptions for example. The contract does not say either what is happening if the subscriber dies suddenly. Relatives or authorities have to take care of that then.

   Reply