Amazon.com Inc. is juicing up its Prime service by giving consumers who pay the $99 annual membership fee early access to some of its best offers. Starting today, Amazon Prime members can access and buy select “lightning deals” on Amazon.com and access daily sales events on the Amazon-owned apparel flash-sale site MyHabit.com 30 minutes sooner than non-members. Lightning deals on Amazon.com are limited-time deals offered throughout the day and often sell out quickly.

Amazon Prime members now see select lightning deals labeled as “Prime Early Access Deal” with a ticker counting down the minutes and seconds until the item is available for them to purchase. MyHabit.com sales start at 9 a.m. Pacific time daily and run for 72 hours. Prime members can now start shopping at 8:30 a.m. Pacific. “With early access deals for Prime members, we are providing our most frequent shoppers with a first look at some of the best offers from Amazon and MyHabit this holiday, and all year,” says Greg Greeley, vice president of Amazon Prime.

Amazon.com Inc., No. 1 in Internet Retailer’s Top 500 Guide , debuted Prime in 2005 offering members unlimited two-day shipping on Amazon orders for a $79 fee. It has since added to what Prime members get in exchange for their membership fee, which it increased to $99 earlier this year. Prime now includes unlimited streaming of select videos and music tracks in its library, and Prime members who own an Amazon Kindle product can borrow e-books monthly as part of their membership.

Amazon says it has “tens of millions” of Prime members worldwide, but has not provided more details. Prime customers are valuable to Amazon because they buy more than other shoppers. A report last year from financial data firm Morningstar Inc. and Consumer Intelligence Research Partners LLC estimated that the average Prime member spent $1,200 annually, compared with $600 for the average non-Prime Amazon customer.