Use ‘Amazon Mom’ to Automate & Save on Diapers & Family Essentials

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I just stumbled across Amazon Mom the other day. No, Amazon Mom is not a super-warrior mother of other warrior women, it’s a program Amazon offer’s targeted at mothers or anyone who is responsible for buying diapers and other essentials for babies and young children. Basically, you put diapers, wipes, and other items you might need to your Subscribe & Save list. Normally Amazon gives you a 5% discount on those items since you’ve set them up to ship to you monthly. When you sign up for Amazon Mom, they add an additional 15% discount (20% total) to all those items.

Automate with Subscribe & Save

I’m a big fan of automating as much of the mundane tasks of life as possible. This leaves you more time to focus on the things that matter most. And that is one of the key principles behind life-hacking in general, and specifically Mormon Life Hacker. Amazon’s Subscribe & Save is an excellent way to do that for non-perishable items that are easy to forget during regular shopping, because they only run out every month or 2 or 3. Amazon gives you free regular shipping, a 5% discount, and removes the hassle and cost of extra runs to the store.

Enhanced Subscribe & Save: Amazon Mom

Amazon Mom, just enhances Subscribe & Save by taking it a few steps further. You get 20% off on diapers and wipes in your Subscribe & Save subscription, plus if you add 5 total items, you’ll get 20% on all those, even if they’re not diapers or wipes. You also get free 2-day shipping on your items. You can sign up for Amazon Mom and get 3 months for free. After the 3 months are up, you can continue to get these great benefits/savings by simply signing up for an Amazon Prime account, at the regular price of $79/year. You’ll then get all the benefits of Amazon Prime, plus the Mom-enhanced benefits of Subscribe & Save.

A few points from Amazon.com:

During the free period, Amazon Mom members do not have access to all of the benefits that a paid Prime membership provides, including access to Prime Instant Videos and the ability to share shipping benefits.

Any customer who has ever received Prime shipping benefits through Amazon Mom or Amazon Student is ineligible for the Amazon Mom 3-month free period. We also consider your free or paid Prime membership history when determining eligibility. Amazon Mom is limited to one membership per household.

I haven’t tried Amazon Mom myself, but will be discussing it with my wife. We just barely canceled our Prime membership at the end of the 30-day trial. But this may get us to go for it. I thought it sounded like a great option, and thought I’d tell everyone about it on Mother’s Day. Especially because automating the purchase of diapers, baby wipes, and other household items, could be a great way to help Mom with the shopping. So if you’re looking for a little something extra (or an “I forgot it was Mother’s Day” gift) to give Mom today, maybe you could sign her up for Amazon Mom!

If you’ve used Amazon Mom, Subscribe & Save, or have an opinion on automating your shopping, tell us about it in the comments.

4 comments
  1. My wife and I have been Amazon Mom subscribers for awhile now (since Oct 2010). I did an extensive price search and found that after the Amazon Mom Subscribe and Save discount they had the best deal. I believe they still do, but I haven’t researched it again recently.

    You will certainly receive promotional emails from Amazon Mom (although they can be easily filtered with a Gmail Filter), but sometimes you gotta expose yourself to advertisers to save a few bucks.

    In the past you could start/stop/add/remove subscriptions at your pleasure, although Amazon must have figured out that everybody would subscribe and then cancel right away, so now your subscribe and save shipments are only shipped on your specific day of the month, so you are forced to truly “subscribe” to get the savings.

    Overall I think the service is great and the price is unbeatable. I’m curious if anybody has had an opposite experience.

    Thanks for the great post Tevya!

    1. Justin, thanks for the comment. Great to hear from someone actually using it. I actually have a few questions, if you don’t mind: 1. is it hard to get the correct amount each month, so you’re not over-buying diapers that won’t fit your baby in a few months? 2. what about once we no longer need diapers/wipes? Can you schedule only other items and still stay in the Mom program? 3. What other items do you receive via monthly subscription?

      1. Before Amazon ships each subscription they send you an “Are you sure?” email about a week before hand. At that time you have the option to stop that month’s shipment. Also I should mention that you can still always change your subscription frequency, the only thing they restrict is the actual ship date. So you can always change how many you receive for each shipment and how many months are in between each shipment.

        I use that “Are you sure?” email as a reminder to ask my wife if she thinks that kid will need that size still, or if I need to get the next biggest size, or if that kid is going to be diaper free soon. For us it has worked well, and we haven’t ever gotten stuck with more diapers than we need.

        I do not believe that an active Subscription is required to be in Amazon Mom, I imagine the only thing they care about is that you receive their mommy specific marketing spam. I’m sure that is spelled out in the Amazon Mom terms and conditions (http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000535351)

        Currently the only item we receive other than diapers are Diaper Genie Refills (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009TJ3J60/ref=rcxsubs_mys2_product_title), which have been nice to reduce diaper odor.

        I imagine there are products that I use on a regular basis that I could do Subscribe and Save on, but I just haven’t taken the time to figure out our usage, compare costs, etc.

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