From time to time, Amazon offers free delivery as part of a special deal to all of its customers, but when that deal isn’t on, how can you get Amazon delivery for free?
The first and most obvious way to get free delivery on every purchase at Amazon is to sign up for a free trial on Amazon Prime. You get free next-day delivery on items, as well as a bunch of other perks. That trial is valid for 30 days, and as long as you remember to cancel before it finishes you’ll never pay a penny. It also comes in handy for Amazon Prime Day, set for 21-22 June this year (see the best Prime Day deals here).
You might think you’ve already used your free trial, but if it’s been more than 12 months since your previous trial you can sign up again.
You could also sign up with another email address and payment details, or use someone else’s Prime account to buy the item. If there’s someone in full-time education in the family, Prime Student offers a 6-month free trial and half-price full membership.
But there is also a way to get free delivery at Amazon Prime without using Prime at all, as we’ll outline below.
How to get free delivery on Amazon without Prime
It’s incredibly frustrating when you’ve searched far and wide for the best deal on the web, yet the delivery charges push you over what you wish or can afford to spend.
Qualifying for free standard delivery (arrives in 3-5 business days) on Amazon requires you to spend a minimum of £20/$25 on goods or buy at least £10-worth of eligible books. So you can spend £16/$20 on goods and fork out up to £4.99/$5 for delivery, costing you a total of £20/$25, or you can spend £20/$25 on goods and get free delivery, still costing you £20/$25.
We’d prefer the latter. But to reach the £25/$25 figure, what you need is a ‘filler item’ – something that costs a few pounds and will be of some use to you. While you’ll still pay £20/$25 in total, you will receive that value of goods in return. And you can always sell or give away the items you don’t want.
The only difficulty here is finding the items that will take your basket total up to the minimum – and more specifically, items at the right price that are also Free Shipping compatible. There are some services that can help.
How to find filler items
We like FillerChecker ( US version here), which searches Amazon UK for items of a specific price. You can narrow down the search by category, such as Beauty, to help you find something you might actually want to use.
Browse to the website, then enter the amount you need to spend to fill your basket to £20. In our case, that’s £2.01.
Now choose a category from the drop-down menu or leave it set to All Products. We’ve chosen Office products.
Click Find It! to begin your search.
FillerChecker will search Amazon’s entire UK store for items that are as close to that amount as possible, then return a list of results ordered by price from low to high.
We found a Metallic Silver Sharpie for £2.98 that takes our basket up to the required amount for free delivery.
There are plenty of other services that do much the same thing if you don’t fancy FillerChecker. Another one is Super Saver Delivery Tool, which is the best option we’ve found in the US. However, that’s much more limited and doesn’t allow you to specify categories.
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Author: Somrata Sarkar, Senior Staff Writer
Somrata researches and writes about the best tech deals to help readers make smart, informed buying decisions. She's an expert on accessories and also reviews laptops, phones, audio and other devices.