How We Use Amazon Household For Our Family

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar Channel and in today’s video, I’ll show you how we use Amazon Household in our family.

For a long time, my family operated with just one Amazon prime account.  That was all we really needed. After all, I’m the chief procurement office for our house, so I do the vast majority of the shopping. And for whatever reason, no one really watched Amazon Prime videos but me. 

Fast forward to now, my kids are teenagers — one is in high school, one in college.  For a whole host of reasons, having multiple accounts now seems much more attractive.  The biggest things was that my son is

• Not Trustworthy - with my credit card.   If he has access to my account he can not only order stuff to be sent to himself without approval, but he figured out how to just create cash by sending himself gift cards.  I had to shut this down.  And because he can’t be trusted with the login credentials on my account, it became kind of a
• Hassle - Any time he wanted to order anything, he either had to use my phone or send me links to what he wanted.  Which would inevitably necessitate a long back-and-forth about sizes and colors and so forth. If I've already approved the basic purchase, I really don’t need to be that involved in the specifics of the product selection process.  Another issue, is that you can only have one
• Default Credit card — on your account.  Anything you buy with “One Click” gets charged to the default credit card.  In addition, digital purchases (like Kindle books and movies) also get charged straight to your default card.  This was fine for a while, but my husband has his own bank account for personal expenses and recently he has bought A LOT of action movies from Amazon.  Every time he does that, I have to transfer money between accounts through our banking app. It’s annoying.  And finally, everyone in our family has different taste in
• Movies and Books - Amazon Household let’s you share all of the movies and books that you have purchased with one other adult.  Teens can’t see purchased digital content, but they can play anything that is free with Amazon Prime.  And whenever they watch something, it doesn’t show up in my feed, so I’m not constantly getting recommendations for new teeny bopper sitcoms or the latest anime movie. 

So, that means that everyone has their own account, but everyone also has access to the household's Amazon Prime status, which means fast shipping and access to Prime content.  So those are what I see as the benefits.

Now let me walk you through the nuts and bolts of how to make this happen.  First, make sure you are in your main account -- this should be whichever account already has an Amazon Prime membership.  If you click on the account link up here, it will take you to a page where you can manage your account.  Scroll down to "Shopping programs and rentals" and choose "Amazon Household."  You can see that there are 3 different kinds of household roles.  You can add one other

• Adult - who can not only share Prime status, but also share payment methods and share digital content like Games, Audiobooks, and eBooks.  You can turn this sharing on or off under Managed Your Family Library.  I think purchased movies are shared by default, but in order to access a movie purchased on another family member's account, you will need to switch to their account in the Prime Video area.  My kids are both set up as
• Teens - This is for kids aged 13 to 17 and allows them to shop with Amazon Prime privileges, but you have 3 options for purchase approval: you can require that they receive your approval before purchasing, you only require approval if the purchase is over a certain amount, or you can allow them to shop without approval.  You can set addresses that your teens can ship to and one payment method.  Whatever addresses and default payment method you set up will be available for all the teens on your account.  In other words, I wasn't able to enter my daughter's debit card for her account and my main credit card for my son's account -- you have to choose one that works with all of the teens on your account.  Every time one of my kids makes a purchase, I get a text notification and an email sent to me for approval.  Once I approve, the order is placed.  My kids can also use their accounts to log in and watch free Amazon Prime movies and access other Prime services.  The last type of account is for
• Children 12 and under - We don't use this account type, but it seems that accounts with this permission level have access to Amazon's FreeTime service.  This appears to be a subscription service giving kids access to age appropriate content including books, movies, and games.  As a parent, you have lots of control over what your child can access with this kind of account. 

If you are creating new Amazon household accounts directly from this page, it is pretty straightforward.  However, if you are trying to link Amazon accounts that your kids have already created, it can be a little more complicated.  I had to spend some time on the phone with a very nice customer service rep to shut down one of my daughter's accounts and connect the other one to our household.  In the end, it was definitely worth the time spent.  Let me know what you think.  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!