Time really does fly, doesn’t it? Prime Day, the period when Amazon (and, probably, a significant number of its competitors) will be dropping prices on a lot of its products for Prime members, is coming up soon. It is scheduled for July 11th and 12th, but there are already a bunch of pre-Prime Day sales hitting.

If you’re interested in the goodies being offered but haven’t signed up for Amazon Prime, don’t worry — Amazon makes it very easy. (Not surprisingly — after all, it would be the sorry vendor who would make it difficult for people to become new customers.)

Besides giving access to Prime Day bargains, Amazon has come up with a bunch of features to entice people to sign up for its Prime service. These include access to Prime Video, its streaming video service; free and faster shipping on purchases (with two-day delivery for many items and even same-day delivery for some); discounts on a selection of Amazon Fresh and Whole Food groceries; Amazon Music Prime audio streaming (not to be confused with the more extensive Amazon Music Unlimited, which is an additional $8.99 / month for Prime members); Prime Gaming, which includes a free Twitch channel subscription; unlimited photo storage (along with 5G of video storage); and Prime Reading, which gives you access to a rotating library of comics, books, and magazines, as well as early access to a curated selection of new books.

You can share your Prime account — and most of its features — with one other adult, along with a teen and / or a child. And you get a 30-day free trial, so you can try it (and the Prime Day specials) out.

Here’s how to sign up.

Choose a plan

• Go to https://www.amazon.com/amazonprime and scroll down to where it reads Choose your plan. (You can, if you want, just immediately click on the button on top of the page that reads Start your free 30-day trial, but don’t you want to see what your options are first?)
• Choose which plan you want. The basic plan lets you sign up for the service at $14.99 / month or $139 / year, which comes out to a little over $12 / month.
• If you’re a student, you can sign up for Prime Student. You’ll get a free six-month trial subscription, and after that, you’ll only have to pay $7.49 a month.
• If you’re on government assistance or use an Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) card, you can also join for less: $6.99 a month with a free 30-day trial.
• Is it your birthday soon? If you have a generous friend or relative, they can gift you a Prime membership using one of Amazon’s gift cards.

Create an account

• Once you’ve decided which plan you’re going to go with, you’ll need an Amazon account. If you don’t already have one, you’ll need to sign up. Click on Try Prime free for 30 days and then Create your Amazon account to set one up with your name, email, and password. We strongly recommend setting up two-factor authentication for your account as well.
• On the next page, Amazon will verify your account by sending what it calls an OTP (one-time password) to your email. Go to your email, copy the OTP, paste it into the Amazon page, and click on Verify.
• You’ll then be asked to enter your credit or debit card information.
• And you’re done!

We should probably mention the obvious: you can sign up for a Prime membership, take advantage of the free 30-day trial, and then cancel it after the Prime Day sales are over. But you can only do that once, so you won’t be able to use that trick next year when Prime Day comes around again.

Update June 26th, 2023, 2:35PM ET: This article was first published on June 9th, 2021, and has been changed to reflect updated information about Amazon Prime.