Amazon Prime’s new fuel savings promise falls short in practice

If you’re a big Amazon customer, you probably have Amazon Prime. The membership saves a lot on shipping charges. The membership also has other perks, including a streaming system for movies and TV shows. Now Amazon says you can save 10 cents a gallon on vehicle fuel purchases. Is it really so? We gave it a try, and here’s what we learned.

Amazon Prime perk—”easy” to set up

The Amazon promo says, “Prime members can now save $0.10 per gallon at approximately 7,000 BP, Amoco, and AM/PM gas stations across the U.S. Based on average U.S. driver statistics when purchasing at qualifying locations, this means nearly $70 of savings per year—that’s nearly half the cost of an annual Prime membership! We’re always asking ourselves how Prime can save members more money, and fuel savings is our latest offer that puts money back into members’ wallets.”

So how does it work? It’s supposed to be simple. To activate the 10 cents per gallon savings, Prime members must jump through a few hoops. The offer only needs to be activated once— the only thing required of customers to enjoy these fuel savings is a Prime membership and a free earnify account with BP.

Once you “activate the offer” you’ll need to connect a member’s Amazon account and earnify account. Members can then use the free earnify app store locator to find the nearest BP, Amoco, or AM/PM gas station. They can simply begin redeeming at the pump by inputting their phone number or linked payment method. Alternately, members can redeem at the pump with the free earnify app by selecting their gas station and pump they are using.

Amazon Prime perk—Read the fine print

Sounds simple enough, but for us, in practice, getting Amazon’s fuel discount got a little dicey. Getting the earnify app was easy enough. We simply took our Android phone to the Google Playstore and downloaded the app. We recommend that folks ALWAYS look at the legal junk. In this case, the privacy and user agreements should be carefully read.

We didn’t like that our agreement would automatically sign us up for advertising—in our case from over 100 different advertisers, so we went the extra mile to “opt out.” Initially, most of the advertisers acknowledged they’d follow our opt-out, but 17 of them didn’t reply. “Could be a technical glitch, try again.” We tried again—several times. Only one finally cut us loose. The other 16, well, “Try again later, like maybe tomorrow,” the system advised.

But trying to get any further into the earnify system, we kept hitting a wall. Finally, we switched off the phone’s VPN—virtual private network. OK, now we could go ahead. We had our registration complete. Now to use it (and tie it to our Amazon Prime membership) we simply had to log in again. We entered the phone’s number, and the system said it would send us a verification code. All we had to do was enter the multi-digit code within 30 seconds.

Amazon’s fuel discount—Perk turns to jerk

Easy, huh? Uh, nope. Not when your multi-digit code doesn’t come for five or more minutes after you’ve requested it. We tried several times, and we still don’t have the needed code. Even if we did manage to work through the mess, we’re not particularly happy to have to switch off our VPN every time we wanted to look for gas.

And that’s a shame. Because we looked around and found that in our area, if we trotted over to the AM/PM station, even paying the extra 10 cents a gallon the station charges for using a credit card, we’d still be able to buy the fuel cheaper than at any other station in town. And when traveling, having access to BP fuel stations, where presumably that extra dime for using a credit card isn’t required, could be a real boon to our fuel-buying budget.

But if we can’t ever make the jump to using this great deal, it’s no deal at all. Other than a raw deal. Maybe when you spin the wheel with Amazon’s fuel discount you’ll get “lucky.” Let us know. Here’s the link to the offer.

Here’s a fuel discount for diesel buyers that REALLY works.

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