OMG! Teens now get more freedom to shop on Amazon

Fidget spinners, sarcasm, Sunny D. These are the hip, cool things teens know and love. Now they can add another item to that list: Buying from Amazon.

The world's biggest online store said Wednesday it has created a new feature for families, allowing moms and dads to give their teens more autonomy to purchase goods on Amazon while still under parental supervision.

With the new US-only feature, which is targeted for kids ages 13 to 17, a parent can add up to four teens to their Amazon Household account for free and set a payment method that a teen can't see, as well as shipping addresses.

Teens can then shop on the Amazon mobile app on their own. Parents will get an email or text for purchases their teens make, and can approve or decline each order. When making purchases, teens can even add a note to their parents, such as "I need this book for school."

"With this program, teenagers will have that independence and parents will have the control that they need," Michael Carr, Amazon's vice president of Amazon Households, said in an interview.

Giving these extra benefits to teenagers should help Amazon hook its next generation of customers to its e-commerce site and other services. As part of this effort, the company in August introduced cheaper student pricing for its Prime Music Unlimited service and has been building out college pickup locations across the country.

The new service should also make life a little easier for parents -- a key demographic for Amazon -- allowing them to create separate Amazon log-ins for their kids that they can monitor.

While Amazon's conditions of use already let children under 18 to use its services while under parental supervision, the company didn't make doing so all that convenient. Parents previously might have had to share their log-in credentials, along with their credit card numbers, with their teen, or set up separate accounts for their children that they'd likely have to check regularly.

The new teen program is available under Amazon Household, a service that lets families share their Prime membership benefits and manage parental controls for their kids' Amazon devices. Amazon won't require age verifications to sign up for the new program and the company didn't create a limited set of items specifically for teens, other than legal restrictions on certain products, such as beer.

Parents can choose not to approve each item their teens buy and instead set spending limits per order. Amazon, though, didn't yet create spending limits on a per week or monthly basis.

Any Amazon customers, including non-Prime shoppers, can use the new program. For now, parents with Prime membership can share Prime two-day shipping, Prime Video and Twitch Prime with their teens' accounts. Other services, such as Prime Now and AmazonFresh, aren't yet available through the new teens program.

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