Amazon Prime membership has a variety of benefits (Kindle Owners Lending Library, Instant Streaming) these days but the original and core benefit has been free two day shipping on its products. Now, Amazon is returning an offer they have made before. If you choose the 5-7 day shipping instead of the free two-day shipping, they’ll give you $1 store credit to spend on Amazon’s MP3 storefront.
Don’t need your items in 2 days? Select “FREE No-Rush Shipping.” You’ll get your items in 5-7 days (excluding holidays), and after they ship you’ll get a $1 credit to spend on music at our Amazon MP3 Store.
You’ll receive your credit within 24 hours of shipment, and we’ll email you then to let you know. You must use this credit by June 26, 2012.
The store credit expires at a certain point. For this purchase, it was June 26th, 2012. I don’t know if that date is fixed for all or is calculated based on the purchase date. Of course, the offer has its own terms and conditions to go along with it.
Is Amazon.com being raked over the coals for express shipping costs? (I say that because I was buying wood chips for a grill/smoker at the time.) I’m sure it is an incentive and Amazon has to be saving more than a dollar if a person switches from two-day to non-rush but they have offered this before, back in November of 2011.
If you want the two-day shipping, use it but if you don’t need the rush delivery on that particular order, you have an incentive to downgrade and pick up a free song in exchange. The free two-day shipping is too core to Amazon’s Prime program, I don’t think this spells the end of the free Prime shipping.