Amazon Prime subscribers might find themselves paying for shipping on certain products during quarantine

You may have heard that Amazon has elected to only accept high-demand shipments from their vendors to their Amazon fulfillment centers. The reason for this is to help focus on the essential items that consumers need for their day to day lives during the coronavirus outbreak. This includes products like toilet paper, water, cleansers and so forth. For everything they deem as not being on their list, they will refuse shipment to these fulfillment centers in order to focus space, resources, and manpower to where it is needed.

As of right now, this will remain in effect until April 5th. What this means for you is hopefully a better selection of “in-stock” items that you may need during this lockdown to keep yourself fed, clean and healthy. However, if they run out of stock on your favorite croquet mallet, you will have to wait until this lockdown on shipments is lifted, else you will be paying for the shipping.

This applies to any items in inventory within the fulfillment center that runs out before the restriction is lifted. What is left in stock will still be made available for Prime subscribers until it runs out.

Once stock of a product runs out, Amazon will still be let vendors and third party retailers make these products available on Amazon for consumers to buy. The vendors just have to provide the shipping themselves. Of course, since Free Prime Shipping only covers items coming from Amazon’s fulfillment centers, this means that you will be responsible for paying for the shipping costs for these items. Unless, of course, the vendors offer free shipping, in which case you’ll still save that money, but likely won’t get your order within the normal 2-day window.

So during this window, Prime subscribers might take a little bit of a hit if they plan on buying anything outside of what is deemed high-demand essentials. At least until the limitation is lifted and Amazon lets things go back to normal on April 5th (assuming that this date doesn’t get extended for any unfortunate reason).