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Amazon is Raising the Price of Prime Monthly Memberships by Nearly 20 Percent (recode.net)
Amazon is boosting the price of its monthly Prime membership fees for new and existing members by nearly 20%. The online retailer said Friday its annual membership fee of $99 will not change. From a report: The increase comes less than two years after Amazon first introduced the monthly payment option as a way to attract new Prime members who either couldn't afford the annual membership of $99, which is not increasing, or didn't want to commit to using the service continuously. Prime is the engine at the center of the Amazon commerce machine -- Prime members buy from Amazon more frequently than non-Prime members and also spend more, hence why Amazon introduced the monthly option to lure new members. So if the company is raising the fee, you can bet that it discovered the current $10.99 was just not sustainable.
Or they just like money... Is that possibility really too crazy to consider?
The new price is $12.99/month if anyone was wondering.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Sustainable my ass. Now that they've got people hooked Amazon wants to make sure they don't leave again and lock them in for a full year.
Bonus side effect: they get to charge people who cannot afford a lump sum of 100$ more. Being poor is expensive.
if you canâ(TM)t afford an upfront payment you should expect to pay more
..they discovered that people would sign up for a month then cancel once they got the high shipping cost item they wanted? Then do it again 2 or 3 times a year? I know people who do exactly this. Same with `flix and `lu. It makes sense to raise the price to cover the people who do that. And being they are not raising the yearly cost, the $99 is profitable, but 10.99 3x/yr is not.
I cant figure that part out.
My packages will get here when they get here.
And usually they arrive much sooner than the estimate.
I will never pay for Prime.
All is true. like Moda
Ironically I just canceled mine this Monday!
No one is forcing you to use Prime. What is this even a story?
I don't want, or need, their offerings outside of the shipping. That is the reason why I have not signed up for Prime. I see no need to pay $99 a year for a service that I will only use HALF of. If they offered a service for $50 or $60 that was products and shipping only called Prime Basic or whatever I would be all over that like a fat kid on a donut. I don't want or need all of their Amazon Music/TV/eBook nonsense.
>> So if the company is raising the fee, you can bet that it discovered the current $10.99 was just not sustainable.
You would lose the bet.
They probably should have done this in mid October before everyone signed up for 1 month for Black Friday shopping and last minute Christmas shopping. The fact that they waited until mid-January at least is a good reminder for everyone who signed up monthly to cancel now that they are done shopping. And it does look like they are giving a 1 month notice, my monthly renewal date is February 5 but they said I won't be charged the extra $2, $12.99, until March 5th, so they are giving people and extra month at the current price it looks like. Nobody likes to pay money, but I think it's a good move by them. We were signing up about every 3 ro 4 months just to save $12 on $60 video game and get it day 1. We were also getting a free month every year, from 3 different people in our house with Amazon accounts, so we probably only paid 1 or 2 months out of the year. Sorry if we ruined it for anybody,w e just did what they let us do. They could have dropped monthly entirely, forced everyone to pay $99, but at least people will still have the option to pay $13 in July for Prime day or next November for Black Friday shopping. It could have been worse. I have no relationship with Amazon except as a customer, and I'll be dropping Prime next month.
Talk about jumping to conclusions. There are a myriad of reasons why the company could be choosing to raise its price and dozens of factors at play. Yet the author picked one, because "reasons." There likely is a analysis out there 100 pages thick about the implications of rising the price yet you think the answer is of-course a one word statement of "sustainability."
For me last straw was Amazon's refusal to sell an item I wanted unless I was a prime member.
When a company gets so big that they feel secure enough in their position to intentionally fuck with their customers essentially telling them to screw off it's time to write that company off and move on.
There was a point in time for which having a membership made sense. This year is going to be my last year of prime. I've actually stopped using Amazon in general for most things in the past year.
Amazon relies heavily on third party sellers these days. It seems like the products from these sellers that are prime eligible just have the shipping costs built into the price. For example, I searched on Amazon "adafruit" (a hobbyist electronics company) and one of the first results is the "Adafruit 328 battery." $18.35 on Amazon, $14.95 on adafruit.com.
For certain items, prime (and Amazon in general) has good deals. If I'm going to by a popular $500 electronic product, Amazon w/prime is usually your best bet. But there are huge categories of products for which Amazon no longer (or never did) makes sense.
I remember an NPR story awhile back that many 3rd party sellers were simply buying products on ebay, marking up the price, re-selling on Amazon, and making a killing. People have been trained to use Amazon even when a simple search can find products cheaper from other sources.
Pantry sucks. The few times I've used it half the cans were severely dented and the deals weren't anything great. Basically Wal-Mart prices.
The prime streaming service is just duplicates of content Netflix and Hulu already offer. I'm guessing they just get the cheapest content (like 90's sitcoms).
Ironically, I've gone back to being a fuddy-duddy and just buying my products in-store. I get what I need and leave. It seems like I have far fewer impulse buys in-person as well.
Business accounts that used have free Prime (when over the $50 limit or whatever) have also been chopped. No more Prime unless you fork out the monthly dough. Fuck that, I wouldn't even have a business account without that, bite me! Bye!
I have a trial membership right now. I don't think I will stay with it.
To get the two hour food delivery, with no additional charges, I have to put together a $35+ order. Otherwise it's an extra $5. I thought I might have use of this, but I don't.
The video selection is not that great.
I can usually put together a $35 order when I order from Amazon, so I get free delivery anyway.
A lot of stuff on Amazon is significantly more expensive than what I would pay elsewhere.
This is just my experience. I suppose it could be worth it to others.
Naive.
Maybe it's the soy insulation cheap products use?
... So if the company is raising the fee, you can bet that it discovered the current $10.99 was just not sustainable. ...
I honestly think the original authors reasoning here is rather a naive view of things, likely drawn directly from Amazon's press release where they attempted to justify the higher prices. It seems far more likely that the new $12.99 per month fee does exactly two things, and nothing more: 1) it only minimally impacts the number of users who will cancel their monthly Prime subscription, and 2) it positively impacts the number of customers who will upgrade their Prime subscription to the yearly model -- which cascades into improved long-term potential profits for Amazon, through increased customer spending over the course of the year. Honestly, it's one of the simplest economic formulae in the book: Increase the price until you've maximized profit potential.
And make no mistake: those monthly fees were indeed already a profit center. If you think otherwise, than you're probably drinking a bit too heavily from Amazon's Kool-Aid.
99/yr > 131.88/yr ? not sustainable? ppl only using prime when they want eg amazon not spending prime resources when not paid for? not sustainable? >_> idgi
So if the company is raising the fee, you can bet that it discovered the current $10.99 was just not sustainable.
This is exactly why I look to /., to provide me with just this sort of keen insight not available in the mainstream press... Thank you Captain Obvious!
Ken
The cancellation link on the site is busted, and all other options for editing the membership fail. Hitting up support chat results in:
I am sorry xxxxxxxxx. I've tried to cancel the membership. Since there is a technical error, We're unable to cancel the prime membership.
Ripped all my credit cards out from my account and that managed to get the end date on Prime to show up for next month.
I would've been on the annual membership but Amazon won't let me switch to it for some reason. Fuck em.
at amazon.com and could not. I got a error message when attempting to cancel. I had the help line call me and the I canceled. Even then I had to wait in line.
Simply not worth it any more - Seems like Amazon wants to push the annual instead of the monthly.
Given the timing I would imagine that they had a lot of people signing up for one month in the November-December window just so they could get free shipping during the holidays and they dropped it. They probably lost a chunk of change on shipping from people who had a ton of packages shipped in such a short window.
How it the monthly fee rate not sustainable when it's 30+% higher than the pre-paid yearly rate? This seems to indicate an upcoming increase in the yearly rate then.
Try that on amazon.ca and let me know how it works. The only thing they have in Canada is "Amazon Family" which gives you 20% off diapers so in Canada their Prime offering is literally shit.
If you have Slashdot Advertising (I haven't seen that since some years before I started to use NoScript or even AdBlock; I guess there is still some advertising somewhere), then perhaps Amazon are bugger buyers than BMW. Or ... there is some other reason. But it's gouging nonetheless.
I actually brought several things from Amazon last year. Three books, one new, as I recall. Despite being told to make it one delivery, it still required three visits to the post office to collect. Explain to me again the reason for this "Prime" crock?
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