As mentioned in the main text of today’s deal at Meh.com, Meh is bringing back their free shipping membership plan, let’s call it version 2.0. You pay $5 per month, and you can cancel it at any time. For any month you are a paying member, you get free shipping at Meh and its other sister shopping sites (Morningsave, Casemates, Checkout.org and any others they may come up with in the future). If you are a regular shopper there, the membership makes sense since a number of their offers face a make-or-break as a deal based on the shipping fee. Details on the new membership at the bottom of this Meh forum post. The top part of the post gives background and history.

This experiment ended…

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Amazon keeps adding more and more to the Prime Benefits, but that’s not all. They strategically decided to go BIG with their TV streaming business, making expensive purchases and plans, such as an upcoming Lord of the Rings TV series. So the writing was on the wall that the Prime membership fee would go up.

And it is. Annual Prime membership fees will increase from $99 to $119. Discussion of the news organized nicely by Techmeme.

The $119/year membership fee goes in effect on May 11 for new members, and June 16 for renewals of existing subscriptions. You can cancel your existing subscription before it renews if you don’t want to pay this higher subscription fee.

If you want to get in at the $99 for the first year, as a new or previous Prime member, you can sign up for Prime Membership now for $99.

As far as I can tell, existing Prime members cannot manually renew their subscription ahead of time using the Prime account website. I don’t know if it’s possible to renew it ahead of time by talking/live-chatting to a customer service representative.

Groupon is boldly going with their April Fool’s Day joke. Their email states “we INCREASED our prices just for you”. It hits too close to home for some shoppers, as many retailers [controlled by manufacturer-controlled pricing] increase prices while portraying them as discounts over MAP 🙂

Overshadowed by the LOL-worthy and Black Mirror-esque news of Alexa laughing at customers (it’s not you, it’s Alexa, or the ghost inside the Echo 😉 was another new expansion of the Prime pool by Amazon. They are launching a Prime discounted membership option for qualifying Medicaid recipients for $6 per month. This is similar (or an expansion) of their existing $6/mo EBT membership. Just like “Amazon Student”, a customer can be on this discounted program for up to four years.

The list of Prime benefits is getting longer and longer, and Amazon is also making noise about getting into the health care business. Certainly this Medicaid development is a step in the right direction.

What next? Prime NOW will deliver a doctor to your front door when you want/need one?

With Ritz/Wolf mostly disappearing and local camera shops fading away as well, drugstore chains are often the places many people go to for prints. And we have a new development on the drugstores front. Walgreens had previously agreed to purchase some Rite Aid stores, but they are not buying the whole company. Announced today, the Albertsons group of companies will be buying Rite Aid, over 2500 remaining stores that are not purchased by Walgreens (buying over 1900 stores) according to the aforelinked Forbes article.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. If Rite Aid thrives under Albertsons, the local photo print markets will get more competition and better prices. If Albertsons starts shutting down stores, it will reduce competition giving CVS and Walgeens fewer reasons to offer good deals. Only time will tell – as always 🙂

Circuit City is planning yet another comeback (attempt). The new plan calls for a new experiential (not experimental) website launching the day after Valentine’s Day (February 15), to be followed with kiosks, stores within stores and even their very own stores if all goes to plan. Imaging will be one of their areas of interest. Details from TWICE at CES 2018.

In addition to their daily deals, Woot has a variety of other sales that run for longer than 24 hours. The problem with all these is that they are hidden from most non-diehards of their website because they are impossible to find. Remember the moofi? 🙂

Anyway, a new attempt at modernization has been launched, an alternative to the existing user interface, the Woot Discover, a visual listing of some of their latest offers, in a tablet-y kind of design. Over 500 items are listed there.

This promotion expired…

The FREE Next Day shipping cut off point a B&H Photo and Adorama is around Thursday 4pm eastern. But don’t wait until 3:59pm ET to place an order. The earlier you submit the order, the better chances you have for an on-time (or faster) delivery 🙂

Amazon’s schedule varies depending on camera/product but also the physical location of the product in question, and the physical location of the buyer (or the delivery address if sending to others as gifts).

Online shopping got a bit stale in terms of innovation before the explosion of mobile, and now, the much tighter integration of digital and “real world” is bringing more crazy things, like Amazon’s Treasure Truck.

NewEgg doesn’t have Amazon-type of real world infrastructure, but they have YouTube technology! Every Thursday at 1pm ET, they are starting a NewEgg NOW Live Stream talking about various tech products and services, and while that stream is running, below it, a variety of tech deals are offered.

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The ever-changing retail landscape makes for strange bedfellows. Kohls and Amazon will begin a new experiment starting October 2017, 80+ Kohls stores in the Chicago and Los Angeles areas will be …accepting Amazon returns according to Reuters. What and how will probably revealed in those markets when the experiment begins.

“Google Express”, Google’s local shopping and delivery service, decided to end their Membership program. A membership will no longer be required to shop there. Current paying members will receive a pro-rated REFUND of their membership fees. This may be a nice amount if you had a prepaid annual membership 🙂

The Help pages at the Google Express page describe the change as follows:

In a related move, Google has a new partnership with Walmart to enable Voice Shopping using the Google Assistant using the Google Home device. Furthermore, Walmart will be joining the growing list of merchants participating in Google Express.

More details via Techmeme.

Starting October 2nd in 2017, Amazon will activate a new policy that makes it easier for buyers to return products purchased and shipped directly from 3rd-party sellers. You will no longer have to contact the 3rd-party seller for a return. You will be able to do it using the Amazon website which will print a prepaid (by the seller) return-shipping label. So the return process will be similar to that of products shipped or fulfilled by Amazon itself.

There’s also a new option for (non-)returning low-cost or high-shipping items or defective items. The sellers have the option to opt-in for “returnless refunds”, where the cost or condition of the item may be such that it would cost the seller more money to process a return, so they’ll instead let the customer keep the item while still issuing them a refund.

From a Buyer perspective, this is great news as it will weed out some of the more iffy or careless sellers, and give you more flexibility in being able to easily return products that are unsatisfactory or defective or otherwise not-as-described.

But from a seller perspective, this is a “sky is falling” moment, where worries of all kinds are expressed by Amazon sellers in multiple threads in the Sellers forum. Fraudulent returns, “free rentals”, losing big on return fees and shipping, feeling pressed into using “fulfilled by Amazon” and so forth.

More details at CNBC.com.

The two biggest TV home shopping networks of the over-the-air antenna era are now one! QVC and HSN are becoming one in a $2.1 billion M&A deal. But wait, if you call now, you’ll get a BONUS TV shopping channel for ABSOLUTELY FREE! Details through Engadget.

If you are an Amazon shopper, and you wonder how all those different 3rd-party sellers get ranked in the Amazon “Add to Cart” section of each product page, you may find this new article at Buzzfeed interesting, as it explains some of the factors and issues, with quotes from multiple Amazon sellers.

A data analyst in the article best defines it: “In a lot of ways the Buy box is a slowed down stock exchange”.

Would you like an organic DSLR with your organic apples? You may soon be able to buy them both side by side. Okay, probably not, but in a surprise announcement today, Amazon revealed that it is paying $13.7 billion in cold hard cash to buy Whole Foods. You can find coverage of this at major tech and business websites and opines by social media gurus, all nicely organized at Techmeme.com.