10 Amazon Features That You Probably Didn't Know Existed

Amazon's been in the news a lot lately, what with its launch of Amazon Pantry and #AmazonCart, its deal with HBO for Prime Instant Video content, a new smartphone launching in a few months, and rumors of an upcoming in-house delivery service.

Sure, you can use Amazon for shopping and watching movies and TV, but there's also a bunch of other features that you might not know about.

Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through his personal investment company Bezos Expeditions.

If you get invited to become an Amazon Vine reviewer, you'll get free stuff from companies to review.

Vine is Amazons invitation-only club for a small percentage of elite reviewers. Every month, Amazon sends selected Vine reviewers a list of products. Each person can select two products to review at a time, and they can keep those items as long as they provide a review within 30 days. Amazon insists that reviews don have to be positive.

Learn more about Amazon Vine

You can use Mechanical Turk to crowd-source "human intelligence tasks" — like identifying photos — to people all over the world.

Mechanical Turk basically gives users access to an on-demand workforce, and it gives people who want to make a little extra money a way to find quick-and-easy online labor. Heres some examples from the site: you can get paid $0.04 per picture to find images of specified real estate agents or $0.02 to copy text from a picture of a business card.

If you live in New York, Seattle or London, you can use Amazon Locker to get your packages dropped off at secure location while you're at work.

For people who work all day and don want to get personal packages delivered to the office yet can never make it to the post office before it closes, Locker is a godsend.

Lockers are often in 24-hour facilities — like 7-Elevens — and when you go to pick up your package you just have to enter a code that was texted or emailed to you to get it.

Check out Amazon Locker.

If you shop with Amazon Smile, the company will donate a percentage of your total order to a charity of your choice at no extra cost to you.

Amazon Flow lets you take a picture of a product on your smartphone to automatically add it to an Amazon shopping list.

With recent initiatives like Amazon Dash and #AmazonCart, the company is trying to get buyers to spend more by making shopping as easy and seamless as possible. Flow — which is available as a standalone app and integrated with Amazons iPhone app — lets you find items you want on Amazon without having to type anything or scan a bar code.

You can read through thousands of questions (and answers) about anything and everything on Amazon's Askville site. Amazon no longer keeps the site active, though, so you can't ask or answer new questions.

Although Amazon disabled the ability to ask and answer questions in 2013, Askville is still a huge repository of (often amusing) information.

Its similar to Yahoo! Answers in that some questions are serious, while others ("Is this the Loch Ness monster?") are clearly just for fun.

You can get a book published in Amazon's Kindle store less than 24 hours after submitting it through Kindle Direct Publishing.

If you e an author who has written a book but doesn'  know anything about publishing, you can get your book out there for free with Kindle Direct Publishing. You can set any price that you want for your book but Amazon will keep 30% of all royalties.

You can share your Amazon Prime account with up to five people.

Amazon Prime accounts cost $99, but you won have to buy your own if you have a friend who feels like sharing. From Amazon.com, navigate to Your Account > Manage your Prime account, where you can then invite up to five people who will be able to share the shipping benefits (though not the access to Instant Video). Those invited will have to enter the Prime account holders birthday to confirm that they know them.

Buy something all the time? You can subscribe to get it on a regular basis.

Amazon lets you subscribe to certain items you'll need to buy over and over, like toothpaste, toilet paper, or dog food. In exchange for agreeing to buy an item on a continuous schedule, you'll get a little discount.

If an item is available for subscription, you'll see the option when you go to check out. You personalize how often you'd like the item delivered, but Amazon will email you before shipping the item so you can delay it if you e using a product slower than expected.

BONUS: You used to be able to use a feature called Diamond Search to buy individual stones on the site based on their carat, shape and color.

Back in the mid-2000s, Amazon really amped up its jewelry business. For several years, Amazon let customers design their own rings on the website, and would then make them in its Kentucky fulfillment center. Diamond Search was an aspect of that.

The company also had a contract with celebrity Paris Hilton that had her selling her jewelry designs exclusively on Amazon.