Amazon Hikes Prime Membership Fee

An anonymous reader writes with official news that, as expected, "Amazon officially announced that it is increasing Prime Membership fees from $79 to $99. Amazon Students will pay $49, and participants of Amazon Fresh (the grocery shopping service) will continue to have a $299 fee. The price hike in Prime Membership is attributed to rising shipping costs, but some wonder if the 'real question around Prime is whether it's sustainable at all, even at a higher price.'"

Comments

Re:Still worth it

[hawguy]

They already have free shipping at the $35 order mark, so... no.

The free shipping is "standard 5-8 day shipping", so it's not quite the same as free 2-day prime shipping.

Plus, my orders rarely exceed $35, so it might take weeks to accumulate an order that big.

Prime still provides value to me (I dropped my $7.99 Netflix subscription when Amazon added free Prime movie streaming - both Netflix and Amazon streaming catalogs are equally poor), even when they increase it from $6.60/month to $8.25/month.

Amazon just wants to see how much they can squeeze

[jeffmeden]

They have a horde of loyal customers who are willing to pay a FEE just to have "exclusive" access to free shipping and some media streaming. What about that needs to be "sustainable", the goal is merely to make people feel compelled to prefer to shop where they have a vested interest (also known as the human nature to "send good money after bad"). Are they collecting as much from the prime fee as it costs them to ship all that crap? Probably not, but that's hardly the point. The question to ask is: would they make more money if prime didn't exist? Meaning, would all those customers who bought with prime have just shopped elsewhere instead? The answer is probably yes, otherwise Amazon would be pulling the plug instead of doubling down and increasing the rate. The last thing they want to do is drive away customers.

Re:Amazon just wants to see how much they can sque

[sandytaru]

What happened was that Amazon expected more people to take advantage of the other Prime features besides free shipping. Instead, free shipping was by far the only thing people really used it for. Their streaming services don't have any of the things I want to watch, unfortunately, since the streaming rights to those shows were all gobbled up by the competitors.