Ninety five per cent of people who have an Amazon Prime account, to get free delivery on all their orders placed online, are sole users of the service, meaning they do not share it with anyone else. The final five per cent take advantage of Amazon Households, a feature that lets everyone at a given address use the same Prime account whenever they want.

However, the e-commerce giant has announced that it is altering the rules for Prime account sharing so that a maximum of two adults and four children are allowed to have profiles. Furthermore, there will be an authentication process by which each payment card associated with the account will need to be authorised by both adults, in order to be used.

Ultimately, this is likely to mean that anyone who has been using their Prime account with friends or family living elsewhere might no longer be able to achieve this.

For the time being, only people who sign up for a Prime account to carry out safe shopping online as new customers will be impacted by the rule changes. So for those who already have an account and do indulge in a little sharing, nothing should change in the short term.

The long term goal certainly seems to make Amazon Prime more about individual users and family units who all live together under a single roof, according to Engadget.

Being able to share free shipping abilities, as well as access to the instant video service that comes as part of a Prime subscription, is certainly something that appeals to Amazon customers. And since the minimum amount which people are required to spend in order to access the super saver delivery option has recently been increased, the Prime route may have looked more appealing to some, until now.