How to sign up for Amazon Prime

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Amazon has announced that its annual Prime Day sales are scheduled for Tuesday, July 12th, and Wednesday, July 13th, and this year, as always, Amazon will be dropping prices on a lot of its products for its Prime members. In fact, it looks like there’s already some momentum building up to the big two-day event with some early deals.

If you’re interested in the goodies being offered but haven’t signed up for Amazon Prime, don’t worry — Amazon makes it very easy. (Not surprisingly — after all, it would be the sorry vendor who would make it difficult for people to become new customers.)

Besides giving access to Prime Day bargains, Amazon has come up with a bunch of features to entice people to sign up for its Prime service. These include access to Prime Video, its streaming video service; free and faster shipping on purchases (with two-day delivery for many items and even same-day delivery for some); free delivery on a selection of groceries (in select cities); Amazon Music Prime audio streaming (not to be confused with the more extensive Amazon Music Unlimited, which is an additional $8.99 / month for Prime members); Prime Gaming, which includes a free Twitch channel subscription; unlimited photo storage (along with 5G of video storage); and Prime Reading, which gives you access to a library of comics, books, and magazines.

You can share your Prime account — and all of its features — with one other adult. And you get a 30-day free trial, so you can try it (and the Prime Day specials) out.

Here’s how to sign up.

Amazon offers a variety of Prime plans.

Choose a plan

Go to https://www.amazon.com/amazonprime and click on the link Explore other plans.
Choose which plan you want. The basic plan lets you sign up for the service at $14.99 / month or $139 / year, which comes out to a little over $12 / month.
If you’re a student, you can sign up for Prime Student. You’ll get a free six-month trial subscription and, after that, you’ll only have to pay $7.49 a month. You also get some extra discounts, such as Showtime for 99 cents a month (up to a year), Amazon Music Unlimited for 99 cents a month, and a two-month trial of Kindle Unlimited.
If you’re on government assistance or use an Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) card, you can also join for less: $6.99 a month with a free 30-day trial.
Is it your birthday soon? If you have a generous friend or relative, they can gift you a Prime membership for either three months ($49) or the full year ($139).

Create an account

Once you’ve decided which plan you’re going to go with, you’ll need an Amazon account. If you don’t already have one, you’ll need to sign up. Click on “Try Prime Free” and then “Create your Amazon account” to set one up with your name, email, and password. We strongly recommend setting up two-factor authentication for your account as well.
On the next page, Amazon will verify your account by sending what it calls an OTP (one-time password) to your email. Go to your email, copy the OTP, paste it in the Amazon page, and click on Verify.
You’ll then be asked to enter your credit or debit card information.
And you’re done!

We should probably mention the obvious: you can sign up for a Prime membership, take advantage of the free 30-day trial, and then cancel it after the Prime Day sales are over. But you can only do that once, so you won’t be able to use that trick next year when Prime Day comes around again.

Update June 23rd, 2021, 2:05PM ET: This article was last published on June 9th, 2021, and it has been changed to reflect updated information about Amazon Prime.