Just as Amazon is considering raising the price of its Amazon Prime subscription service, competitor Newegg is launching its own subscription-based program that offers free shipping to frequent shoppers.
Newegg Premier offers free 3-day shipping or discounts on faster shipping to customers who pay $50 per year. There’s also no restocking fee for returns and Newegg promises special deals and alerts.
What you don’t get is pretty much everything else that comes with Amazon Prime.
Amazon Prime may have started as a free shipping program, but over the past few years it’s become much more. Subscribers also get access to thousands of streaming TV shows and movies and the ability to borrow a Kindle eBook each month from the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library.
Even if you don’t use those digital media services Amazon Prime has a few things going for it that Newegg Premier doesn’t. For instance, Amazon offers free 2-day shipping to subscribers… and Amazon sells virtually anything you could ever want to buy while Newegg is primarily an electronics superstore (although the company does offer everything from sporting goods to toothpaste).
Still, the $50 Newegg Premier program is cheaper than Amazon’s $79 Prime service. And if Amazon does get around raising its rates, the gap could widen. It’s nice to see that at least one other retailer would like to offer a cheaper alternative.
Just a thought on Amazon’s 2-day shipping; there’s been a few times in the last year that I’ve experienced it not being literally two-day (IE you order and it’s there in two days from then) but 2 days from when it’s actually shipped (which has made two days into more like three or four.); I also don’t really know anybody who uses their video services; I own an android phone and tablet, a windows laptop, a Mac desktop, and an apple TV and, y’know, it’s not available on any of these besides the browsers of my laptop and desktop. Dubious advantage when its not available for a lot of devices.
American Express’ll make shoprunner free for you, then you can get Newegg with free two day. 🙂