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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?
Personally I love prime, but at $129 I would actually count my purchases
Prime makes financial sense if you make on average more than 2 orders a month items that would be covered by prime that would not be eligible for free shipping, at $5 shipping.
The streaming videos and free upgrade to 2 day shipping on prime eligible items: add additional value.
I suppose what would be interesting is if they started offering a "Prime Lite" for $60 a year --- with no streaming videos, no 2 day shipping, but free standard shipping on all normally prime-eligible items fulfilled by Amazon.
I find it interesting that this comes just as Amazon has fallen in love with hybrid shipping services such as UPS Mail Innovations and FedEx SmartPost for Prime delivery. These services utilize UPS or FedEx only to the destination city where your package is then handed off to the USPS for delivery. As a result, Prime "guaranteed" 2-day delivery has become "often 2-day" or "occasional 2-day" ...and now, they feel like this is worth more? Wow.
Oh, they still haven't dropped the magic word "guaranteed". Their offering to satisfy the guarantee is an additional month of inconsistent, slower than stated service.