Looking to save a few dollars on your toothpaste, toilet paper, or t-shirts by ordering on Amazon rather than trekking over to your local Wal-Mart? It might seem like a good deal if you’re an Amazon Prime member, but is it actually worth it? The $99 membership fee may pay for itself for some online shopping aficionados, but for others, it may not be the best bet. And now, there’s a tool to help you figure that out. Meet the latest service from online shopping tool Slice: My Amazon Report.
To determine whether or not you should be subscribing to Prime, My Amazon Report takes stock of your purchase receipts (so yes, you’ll have to register and link your email address to get this to work). Then, the app’s calculator sums up all purchases you made in the last year, and computes whether or not a Prime membership will actually save you money on shipping.
Take these results with a grain of salt — the only thing Slice is really examining here is your shipping cost, so it can’t really tell you whether that slight price difference between the soap you ordered from Amazon and the one you didn’t buy at Bath and Body Works was actually worth it. And if you’re a big user of other Prime services (like streaming video or music), those are intangibles that My Amazon Report from Slice can’t help you with.
All the same, you’ll be able to visualize how much you spent on an average Amazon purchase, and your most and least expensive buys during a calendar year. So at the very least, you’ll have a snapshot of your online spending habits, which could help you determine if you need to scale back (or if you’re ready to up your game).
So if you’re weighing the pros and cons of Amazon Prime, this may just be the tool for you.
