Price of Amazon Prime May Jump To $119 a Year

colinneagle writes "Amazon CFO Tom Szkutak hinted during the company's earnings conference call [Thursday] that we might see an increase to the company's popular Amazon Prime service. As it stands now, Amazon Prime costs $79 per year and offers users free shipping on millions of items, free book borrowing for select Kindle titles, and last but not least, free streaming to the company's video on-demand service. Going forward, Amazon may increase that pricepoint to either $99 or $119. That's a rather significant price increase, but it's important to keep in mind that the price of Amazon Prime has remained the same ever since Amazon first started the program nine years ago." How many products do you use that haven't increased in price for that long?

Comments

Prime is for those who don't understand marketing

[justthinkit]

Prime is for those who don't understand marketing.

Why do manufacturers come out with those two-bit coupons? The handling on that $0.25 discount is probably $25.00. What do they get for that?

(1) They get some advertising of their product, sure, but most importantly (2) They lower the barrier to entry/purchase so that (3) More people buy their product with (4) Less thought about it.

Gift cards are a similar idea. Give someone a gift card and they will spend it as a "bonus". Give them cash and they will treat it like all their other cash. When gift cards first came out, they used to offer something extra, for your trouble. That something extra was a tip-of-the-icebergian fraction of what they were gaining from the transaction. Now we are all so accepting of, and enamoured with, gifting hunks of plastic that they charge...up to $10...for a "gift" charge card.

When you have "free shipping" you buy (1) more stuff, (2) more often, (3) with less thought about it. And Amazon laughs all the way to the bank.

If I want something and it is over the $25/35 cutoff, then I order it. Otherwise I put it on the wish list and forget about it. For video watching I use Netflix. Amazon Prime is for $DerogatoryWord.