I just received my first order from Amazon using their Amazon Prime Pantry shopping service. If you haven’t heard of this before – join the club. I stumbled upon it while browsing Amazon and the lightbulb went off in my head. Like many small businesses I’m forever running errands to stock my office fridge.
Why not just get these items at the store? It’s all about convenience.
The Amazon Prime Pantry is a service where you fill a box with up to 45 points or 4 cubic feet of select Amazon items. Most of these items are household supplies — snacks, cleaning materials, drinks. Shipping is a flat rate of $5.99.
As you fill your box Amazon continuously updates you on remaining space . If you exceed the capacity of one box Amazon helpfully starts another for you.
For example I purchased a case (24 bottles/16.9 oz each) of Nestle Pure Life water through Amazon Prime Pantry. We like to have water in our office refrigerator but we don’t use enough to make it worth subscribing to a local water delivery service. The cost on the water was $3.00 (plus the $5.99 I paid for my pantry box). If I were instead to purchase a 35 pack of Member’s Mark Purified water through Amazon I could spend only $1 though the purchase would cost $54 to ship (most heavy items such as this don’t qualify for free Amazon Prime shipping).
I don’t find $5.99 to be an excessive price for delivery – especially when it saves me the trip to a store and I don’t have to lug the water to my car, out of my car, up the stairs to my office. Instead the Amazon Pantry shipper does that all for me.
And you can get more than just water. Amazon Pantry presently offers snacks ( Oreos, chips, etc), toiletries like toilet paper, as well as laundry, pet supplies, kitchen supplies.
This is a service that’s exclusive to Amazon Prime members – which itself costs $99/year (about $8.25/mo). Whether it’s worthwhile to you probably depends on the type of items that you regularly purchase from the store. If you’re a Prime member give it a try the next time you have a grocery list full of items that you’d like someone else to carry up your steps.
I placed my order on December 29 and received the shipment on January 2 which is probably a day delayed due to the New Years holiday. This is an Amazon Prime benefit I’ll be using more frequently in the future.