Amazon Subscribe & Save

I really love Amazon’s Subscribe and Save program. In a nutshell, you can get a 15% (or sometimes greater) discount on certain items if you agree to have them automatically shipped at regular intervals. If you’re a Amazon Prime customer and they have a good price on something you use often, it’s a no-brainer. Household cleaners, food, etc. are good candidates.

But what really impresses me is how honorable the system is. Subscription can be a dirty word for a lot of customers. Many companies that offer subscription products rely on shipping you more than you want, more often than you want and hope that you’ll forget or find it too confusing to cancel. It’s part of the model and I’m sure it results in tremendous revenue. 

But Amazon is completely up-front with Subscribe & Save. If you want to cancel the subscription after the first shipment and just bank the discount, you can. It’s simple to change the frequency or cancel any item’s subscription. But what I really like is that you get an email shortly before each shipment. The email tells you when it will ship and gives you a clear break down of the price like this:

Quantity: 1 
Subscribe & Save price: $15.74 
Regular price: $18.52 
Subscribe & Save price of last shipment: $21.28 

Not only are they showing you the subscription discount but also what you paid last time. And as you can see above they gave me the current lower price, too! That’s a delight as a customer. Many companies would lock you in to whatever price you signed-up at. 

The email also gives you the option to skip or cancel the shipment in a single click. It’s great.

Amazon gets so many of these little goodwill gestures right. They make it a pleasure to be a customer. I’m surprised how few people seem to know about Subscribe & Save so if you haven’t tried it, I’d highly recommend that you do.