Both Amazon Mom and Amazon Subscribe & Save are worthwhile membership programs to maximize your Amazon purchasing power and take advantage of home delivery of household essentials, without the shipping expense. I get everything except haircuts from Amazon these days… just ask our local UPS driver!

Attention parents – would you like to automate home deliveries of diapers, wipes and other baby care items, save 30% on your order, and earn up to one year of free Amazon.com Prime membership – all at the same time?

If you’re not a parent to small children, keep reading – you can still get 15% off, free shipping, and automated deliveries of laundry supplies, coffee pods and other household essentials. Here’s how.

Prime Shipping Benefits

You may already know about the Amazon Prime membership – for $79 a year, you get free two day shipping on all Amazon Prime elegible items.

That’s good news for last minute shoppers. Order that birthday gift on Weds, get it Friday – just in time for the weekend party. You save precious time otherwise spent planning ahead and trying to batch orders to make the shipping fee worth it. But is $79 a year worth the convenience?

Give it a test whirl for three months free by signing up for an Amazon Mom membership. All moms, dads, grandparents, caregivers are welcome to join.

Membership is free. Just list your children and their birth dates (I used nicknames instead of real names) and you get the first three months of Amazon Prime free.

Then, you can extend your free shipping benefits for up to a year by shopping in the Baby Store – for each order of $25 or more you get another month of Amazon Prime membership.

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Subscribe & Save – Deliveries to Your Door

Sign up for the Subscribe and Save program and schedule automated deliveries of things like laundry supplies, baby care, and coffee.  For each item you can elect to have it shipped to you every one, two, three, or six months.

Shipping is free on all Subscribe & Save items, and you get 15% off the regular price.  If you’re an Amazon Mom member, you get an additional 15% discount.

You can cancel or change the date of a shipment at any time.  And, you get “Order Shipping Soon” email notifications so you can cancel, postpone, or change an order before it ships – automation, but with enough controls in place so you don’t have to remember to monitor it.

I love this service and use it for diapers, coffee, laundry detergent, and more.

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Free Shipping, But Does It Save Money?

Amazon’s Subscribe & Save program reminded me a lot of Alice.com, another household essentials automated delivery service, which I recently reviewed here.

One big difference I noted was that Alice.com offers more products in “normal” or even smaller than normal sizes, whereas Amazon offers more bulk or “warehouse” type product sizes, which I definitely prefer.  More product, less packaging.

On pricing, Amazon has the edge as well, with prices that compete or beat the local grocery store, sometimes even before the 15% and 30% discounts.  Here are two quick comparisons.

1) Luvs Size 4 diapers – box of 96.  (Note that on Amazon, get the best deal by purchasing the 180 count box – price per diaper drops to $0.13 each.)

2) Tide HE Clean Breeze 64 load detergent, 100 oz