Last year i signed up with Amazon Prime for £79 a year. mainly because they had some decent SciFi series that I fancied watching. The Expanse, Picard and Man in the High Castle were the main ones. However one actually gets a lot more. There are books and magazines one can download and read without paying extra. Magazines are obviously sprat to catch a mackerel promotions but it does mean one can read the sort of magazine now and again one would not readily buy, this month Continental Modeller appeared. 
However biggest bit we have used is the purchasing on Prime with quick delivery. I say we as SWMBO seems to have used it quite a bit for quilting items.

I have found it good though for small tools and components and it was reading the thread on nuts and bolts that prompted me to hit the keyboard. I have not bought any fasteners yet. What I have bought are assorted plugs, sockets and switches which seem to come in decent pack sizes at very low prices. I also recently bought 12 gear boxes with 12V motors. I think 10 to just under £4. I did not have an immediate use but have been on the look out for cheap 12V motors for a while an
 these certainly fit the bill. I have a few model rail ideas about using them. The point is that certain items are often available from a range of sellers at varying prices. Going for the cheapest with the Prime tag means Amazon are behind it so so far no hassles, and often next day delivery. Where it has been offered it has always happened and even next weeks tend to arrive sooner. 

Obviously one does not have to sign up to Prime to use amazon. I certainly got brownie points for having it this year as the US Tennis Open was on Prime and that certainly generated a story.

Recently I was looking up small fasteners. M2, M3, M4, M5 and there are plenty on offer usually as selection boxes for around £10. Also self tapping screws, really all the little bits B&Q never has and other places have as small quantities at very high prices.

Must say I have not checked it for BA, must do that next. Unfortunately I have no shares in Amazon, or am related to Bezos! 
Just checked. Assorted BA screws £34 in Brass, Assorted 2BA stainless steel £45. However metric small stuff from a £5 upwards for multi -packs. Looks like BA has had its day!.

I use Amazon Prime regularly for shopping David although not often for films………….it's Amazon.fr and they have a different range of films to UK.

For me, it's so easy to shop there and free delivery within a couple of days or so makes it so much easier than driving into town to search for something that you don't find but have wasted time, fuel and often, money parking the car.

Having said that, I don't know how Amazon operates but French Prime doesn't appear to be as good as UK or Germany - sometimes items I want only seem to be available in either UK or Germany.  Obviously I can't use Prime except in France and strangely, Amazon UK often won't send stuff to France.  I've hit that snag occasionally when trying to buy from Amazon Germany but not as often as I have with Amazon UK.  Postage is then the snag when buying from "overseas" although they do have some pretty impressive postal rates compared with Joe Public.

I've been using Prime for a few years now, some things are cheaper, a few are not, I did look at BA nuts and bolts, but the smallest they listed was 6BA, I wanted 6BA - 14 BA, the larger sizes ain't much use in N gauge!
Some items it can be better to try a dealer who specialises in a specific range.
On another forum an American member was having problems sourcing 1mm & 2mm card in sheets suitable for building Scalescenes downloaded kits, looked on Amazon UK, plenty of it, I know USA use different standards for weight of paper/card - are there any usable conversion charts? I've found GSM to mm but on the other side of the pond GSM is virtually unknown.

I'm not sure the thickness would be a problem in the States Mike but the paper size certainly would - AFAIK, they don't use A4 over there at all.  If their equivalent had been a tad larger than A4, it would just leave them a larger margin but, being smaller, A4 prints are just too big for the US paper…….

I first used amazon for books while working in the middle east at the turn of the century. Used US amazon and got interesting books quickly. I have also used German amazon for books, packet included small bag of sweets!
Brexit has made overseas ordering of items erratic, however I have ordered things on Prime that were not available for next day delivery but obviously came from overseas via Amazon UK. Some stuff I ordered obviously came from Germany and quilting stuff for other half came from USA. Obviously Amazon were dealing with all the tax stuff.

While the likes of amazon can cope with brexit smaller companies can find it difficult. 

I hope you mean "turn of the decade"  rather than turn of the century !  Did Amazon Prime exist 21 years ago
?…….

 "If their equivalent had been a tad larger than A4, it would just leave  them a larger margin but, being smaller, A4 prints are just too big for  the US paper……."

His problem seemed to be unable to find any card of 1mm or 2mm thickness, no mention of A4.  I have managed to rescale 4mm to 2mm and using photo editing software it's easy to edit most downloaded drawings, to get round the smaller paper size copy say half or three quarters of a sheet and paste it to the smaller page, then copy/paste the rest of the page.

[user=6]Petermac[/user] wrote:

I hope you mean "turn of the decade"  rather than turn of the century !  Did Amazon Prime exist 21 years ago
?…….

 

"Prime" is a relatively recent development but my first online purchase from Amazon would have been nearer 2000 than 2010.

Back in those days cheap / free postage worldwide was a carrot and very attractive to us here when local prices were still very high relative to US /UK. (still are for some things  :???:). Amongst other things, I managed to build a near complete library of Le Carre DVDs for that "rainy day" which have been worked thru these last 18 months.

These days it's all segmented so you find many sellers won't ship from the .UK site.

 We might also reflect on the issue that some tiny fraction of each purchase may be contributing in some way to the consumption of the vast energy required to fling space tourists into orbit just for the thrill of the experience while billions in the poor world can't even get a COVID jab.

[user=2170]Colin W[/user] wrote:

We might also reflect on the issue that some tiny fraction of each purchase may be contributing in some way to the consumption of the vast energy required to fling space tourists into orbit just for the thrill of the experience while billions in the poor world can't even get a COVID jab.

I couldn't agree with you more Colin.

Bill  :sad:

Yes. They started in the 1990s selling only books. 

I too totally agree with you Colin.

I'd have thought these super-rich bods could have found something more philanthropic to spend their money on.