How to Cancel Amazon Prime - Steps and Things to Know

Canceling Amazon Prime (this article covers Amazon Japan) is straightforward and can be done from the official website or the app. Go to your account settings, open "Manage Prime Membership", and choose "End membership".

• Step 1: Log in to Amazon and open Account Services
• Step 2: Select "Manage Prime Membership"
• Step 3: Click "End membership (and stop receiving benefits)"
• Step 4: Confirm with "End my benefits and membership" on the confirmation screen

The whole procedure takes 2 to 3 minutes. Amazon will show a few retention screens along the way, but keep clicking through to the end and the cancellation goes through reliably.

The same steps work in the Amazon smartphone app: open "Account Services" and proceed to "Manage Prime Membership" from there.

Once you cancel, every Prime benefit goes away: the delivery perks, Prime Video, Prime Music, Prime Reading, and the unlimited photo storage in Amazon Photos. The photos deserve special attention, because anything beyond the free 5 GB tier can become subject to deletion. Back up your library before ending the membership.

Cancellation does not cut you off immediately, though. You keep the benefits for the remainder of the period you have already paid for: until the next renewal date on the monthly plan, or the end of the contract term on the annual plan. There is no clever timing to optimize; whenever you cancel, you lose nothing you have paid for.

If you use Subscribe & Save recurring deliveries, review those settings before canceling too. Recurring deliveries continue without a Prime membership, but the discount rate can change.

Canceling is not a one-way door: you can rejoin at any time. Whether a free trial applies again depends on your previous usage and how much time has passed, and the sign-up screen will tell you whether you qualify before you commit.

That flexibility opens up a deliberately intermittent style of membership: cancel when you are not using the benefits, and rejoin when you need them. Some users take this further as a seasonal strategy, rejoining just before the big sale events like Prime Day or Black Friday for the fast free shipping, then canceling once the sale ends. If you find yourself rejoining often, that is a good sign the membership deserves to run year-round.

The clearest signal that it is time to cancel is a sustained drop in usage. If two or three months have gone by in which you did not order from Amazon even once a month and barely watched Prime Video, the membership fee is probably not paying for itself.

Look back through your order history and tally the last three months: the shipping fees the delivery benefit actually saved you, the number of videos you watched, and any other perks you used. Judging by the numbers rather than by feel leads to a rational decision. And since re-registration takes only a few minutes whenever you need it again, there is no reason to fear canceling.