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How to cancel your Amazon Prime membership

Last updated: January 13, 2022

To cancel your Amazon Prime account, go to End Your Amazon Prime Membership and follow the instructions there.

You’ll be fine! You can still order from Amazon without a Prime membership – you’ll just be less likely to order things that you don’t need. And you’ll be more likely to buy from non-monopoly companies, such as those listed here on Good Reports in How to shop without Amazon.

On January 13, 2022, the NYT’s Shira Ovide wrote How I quit Prime and survived:

My renewal came up, and I just shrugged and stopped paying. That changed my behavior. . . . I shopped in local stores, partly because I didn’t want Amazon and other giant retailers to be the only ones left after the pandemic. . . . I think I also buy less stuff without being a Prime member because it’s not as easy to impulse buy from my sofa. Some On Tech readers said that they had the same experience.

Other resources

• Matt Stoller explains why Amazon Prime Is an Economy-Distorting Lie (May 30, 2021).

• From Mark Hurst’s Why I’m losing faith in UX (January 28, 2021):

UX is now “user exploitation.” A perfect example is the Amazon Prime cancellation process. I learned about this from Isabella Kwai’s New York Times story two weeks ago: a consumer-rights group in Norway has filed a complaint about Amazon’s absurdly difficult, inconvenient process for turning off a Prime subscription. Here’s the original complaint, which includes this (emphasis mine):

The cancellation procedure is long, and consists of six separate pages. On each separate page, the consumer is nudged toward keeping their Prime membership, even though they have began a procedure to end the agreement. . . . This uncertainty is further strengthened by having to scroll through the page, which is full of text and graphics to show how cancelling the membership will mean the loss of many benefits.

(There’s a video showing the process, too.)