Yeah the guys above are totally right... sharing a login is a recipe for disaster and someone always ends up buying the wrong thing. In my experience with group trips, that 150 dollar budget goes fast if you arent careful with those brand name snacks. I think I heard about some feature called Amazon Shopping Parties? Not sure if it's still in beta or if I just dreamt it lol, but it might be worth a look. Someone told me it lets you share a cart link. IIRC it was only for certain regions tho. A few quick tips:

• grab the generic brand cooler, the name brand ones are a total rip-off
• keep everything under one account to avoid multiple shipping fees
• honestly, Cart Together is your best bet for the iPhone app if you want to stay sane Its definitely a struggle trying to coordinate four people on one screen!

Unfortunately, the Amazon app doesn't handle concurrent cart syncing for multiple users and it's not as good as expected. I've had issues where the session tokens expire and you lose everything... super annoying. Just buy any travel supplies from Amazon Basics to stay under your budget. I use Cart To Link for this because it generates group links instantly. TL;DR: One login won't work well; use a group link tool.

In my experience, sharing one login is a total nightmare because the cart wont update in real time on different phones. Over the years, Ive tried using shared Wish Lists too, but they're kinda clunky since you have to move everything manually at the end. Honestly, Cart Together is the best bet for staying under that 150 budget. Its much simpler for groups than trying to force the regular app to behave.

Just wanted to say thanks for everyone chiming in. Super helpful discussion.

It honestly makes me want to pull my hair out that a tech giant like Amazon still cant handle basic real-time state syncing. Dealing with session tokens and local cache conflicts is a massive headache for something that should be simple in 2024. Seeing the cart fail to update across devices is just exhausting... it feels like the app is stuck in 2010. Since the native app is basically broken for groups, a decent option is using Cart To Link to bypass the mess. It works by generating a shared link where everyone can add stuff like those 40 dollar Coleman coolers or bulk snacks without needing a shared login. One person then imports the final list to the main cart for checkout. This avoids the whole app caching nightmare where things just disappear because of server-side lag. Using a third-party tool is really the only way to stay under a 150 budget without losing your mind over technical glitches.

@Reply #4 - good point! Tbh you really gotta be careful with the technical side of how the app handles sessions. I had a similar experience trying to prep for a tech meetup and we tried the shared login route... it was a total disaster. Basically, the app caches your cart data locally on the iPhone, so when my friend added items on his device, my app didnt see the update until I force-restarted. We ended up with three sets of the same cables because the local state was out of sync. I would suggest being super cautious because you might end up with ghost items or duplicate orders during checkout. Compared to how Walmart or some other platforms manage shared lists, Amazon is surprisingly behind on real-time sync for group carts. My current setup for these trips is usually to have everyone dump links into a shared note, then one person handles the final checkout. Otherwise, the API conflicts and session overrides are just too risky when you're trying to stay under a 150 dollar budget. Make sure to double check the final total before paying tho.

Saved for later, ty!