What Is Amazon Prime Pantry Credit?

One of the biggest benefits of using Amazon Prime is having a pantry right at your fingertips.

Yes, we’re talking about groceries!

You never know when you’ll need to purchase pantry items online, and especially during the Covid pandemic online shopping has become much more essential for people as it ensures they can stay safe and still get items they need. 

What is Amazon Prime Pantry, exactly?

Amazon Prime Pantry is a service that enables you to purchase household goods right from the comfort of your home. 

It’s not just groceries that you can purchase, but a range of other items, such as hygiene products and cleaning products for the home. Does that sound interesting? Here’s everything you need to know about Amazon Prime Pantry credit – and how Amazon has made changes to it – so that you stay ahead of the curve and get the best online shopping experience. 

What Is Amazon Pantry? 

If you are an Amazon Prime member, you’ll know that you used to be able to make use of the Pantry service.

When doing so, you would need to purchase items that reached a total of $40 before you would be eligible for free shipping on your order. If you didn’t reach this total, you will have to pay $7.99 for shipping. Non-perishable goods were available from the Pantry and were easily recognizable from their “Prime Pantry” label.

These items would be ordered in a large box and each item that you’d add to your cart would take up a certain amount of space in the box. To save you some money, you could make use of coupons.

How Did It Come About? 

Amazon Pantry was established in 2014.

It’s goal was to provide customers with shelf-stable food and snacks as well as other household items such as cleaning products, so that people could purchase bulky products online in a more convenient way, and without having to pay a high amount of money to have them shipped.

The idea was for customers to fill a large box with items from the Prime Pantry. 

When it first started, Amazon Prime Pantry was only offered to people who were members of the Prime free shipping program, and Amazon charged an extra $5 per month as a subscription option for people to use the service in 2018. 

What Are Amazon Prime Pantry Credits? 

Prime Pantry credits are basically money that you could use to purchase household goods and have them delivered to your house within one to four business days.

How you earned Prime Pantry credit was by making use of no-rush shipping on Amazon. 

No-rush shipping means that you’ll get your Amazon order within six business days but you’ll earn rewards when making future purchases or even earn immediate discounts. If you use Amazon a lot, then this could really be value for money. 

Is Amazon Prime Pantry Still Around? 

Okay, now for a bit of bad news. Although Prime Pantry was a fantastic way for people to make use of their accumulated credit and order household items directly from the site with free shipping, it has sadly been discontinued.

During the first wave of the Covid-19 virus, lockdowns caused Amazon to put the Pantry service on hold as a result of a high amount of orders that were being placed.

That said, it’s not certain whether these orders have been reduced, or if Amazon has eliminated Pantry to make way for a different shopping feature.

Can You Still Get The Items You Want Without Prime Pantry?   

Although Amazon Prime Pantry is a service that’s no longer being offered by the retail giant, the products that were being offered by Pantry have now been placed in Amazon’s main retail website.

The good news about this is that you can purchase household items and groceries directly from the website without first requiring a subscription to a specific service. 

Subscriptions aside, there were other drawbacks to the Pantry. These included how deliveries usually took a longer time to reach customers than anything that was ordered via Amazon Prime. Ground shipping of household groceries and other items usually took between one to four days, while Amazon Prime deliveries take up to 48 hours.

Then, there was also the hassle of how the items that you wanted to purchase from the Pantry were catalogued separately on the website. This was not only confusing, but it meant that when you ordered items they were not included with any other items you had purchased via Prime, you’d have separate shopping carts for items you were essentially purchasing from the same website.  

What You Can Still Do With No-Rush Shipping Credits Or Discounts

When you choose no-rush shipping, you will receive an instant discount that will be applied to your order when you checkout.

A promotional reward will be applied to your Amazon account when the package is shipped. While it depends on the offer, you can use your rewards from Amazon in a variety of ways, such as to purchase Kindle books or digital music.

While any customer who uses Amazon to purchase items online is eligible for a discount when they choose the no-rush shipping option, only Prime members can receive rewards. 

What Does Amazon Offer Instead Of Prime Pantry? 

Since Amazon owns Whole Foods, it has started to offer customers Amazon Fresh-branded stores.

The Fresh and Whole Foods delivery services are still available for Prime members. This enables grocery deliveries in more than 2,000 U.S. cities. Thanks to having gained Whole Foods, Prime customers in certain U.S. cities can have fresh food delivered to their homes. 

If you’re on Amazon and you click the Prime Pantry link, you’ll be directed to a page that offers household and grocery items that you can purchase directly from the site. 

What About Amazon Prime Now? 

If you want to get really fast deliveries on items that you need, you should make use of another Amazon Prime perk: Amazon Prime Now.

This is a service that offers two-hour and one-hour deliveries on items, such as household, baby, and grocery items. Available in a variety of cities, Amazon Prime Now is a fantastic alternative to Amazon Prime Pantry because of how it offers excellent service and convenience. 

Here’s how it’s different from Amazon Pantry: 

• Amazon Prime Now is cheaper to use than Amazon Prime Pantry. While purchasing orders that were less than $35 on Amazon Prime Pantry would result in you being charged a flat shipping fee of $5.99, Amazon Prime Now charges a flat fee of $4.99 for orders that are less than $35. It also offers many more products than what you’d find with Amazon Prime Pantry. 

• If you don’t reside in the U.S. you might still be able to make use of Amazon Prime Now. This is because the service is available in over 15 cities worldwide. By comparison, Amazon Prime Pantry would only cater to U.S. customers.

• But, it’s really the delivery speed that makes Amazon Prime Now the best service because of its one- or two-hour delivery times. With Amazon Pantry, while you could stock up on essentials for the kitchen and home conveniently, you’d have to wait between one and four days to receive your goods.

It’s clear to see that it’s worth your time and money to start using Amazon Prime Now.  

Related Questions

How much does Amazon Prime Now cost? 

Since it falls within your Amazon Prime subscription of $12.99 per month or $119 per year, you can enjoy Amazon Prime Now at no extra cost.  

Did Amazon Prime Pantry sell fresh goods? 

No, that’s where AmazonFresh came in! On Amazon Prime Pantry, you could only purchase shelf-stable items and household products. 

Conclusion 

If you ever wanted to know all about Amazon Prime Pantry, now you have the lowdown.

Unfortunately, the service has been discontinued, but that doesn’t mean you can’t purchase groceries or other household items from Amazon – or make use of fantastic discounts and rewards as an Amazon Prime member.

In this article, we’ve looked at why Amazon has shut down its Prime Pantry service as well as how you can make the most of the changes. Even without Amazon Prime Pantry to enjoy, there are loads of other ways in which you can make the most of your Prime membership and purchase goods for the home and pantry right from the comfort of your computer.