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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.
of course it's sustainable, otherwise they would have raised the $99 yearly fee. The price hike is just to make some people to switch to the full year price, thinking they will get the better deal. It will work for some, and savvy people will only subscribe for november (black friday) and july (prime day)
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Back when I was on a free trial of Prime, I switched all of my preorders to the free two-day shipping option. After the free trial was up, all of my preorders (some of which would not ship for several months) retained the free two-day shipping. So yeah, I can totally see people signing up for a month of prime in order to place a bunch of orders.
WalMart is becoming competitive with them (fewer shipping problems and better packaged for shipping) AND they have brick and mortar stores which Amazon barely has.
They probably got annoyed at people signing up for the monthly prime service in November/December, then canceling in late December/January.
The difference is that with Amazon I don't have to shop at Walmart.
Not saying Amazon's warehouse workers are treated amazingly well, but they are a shade better than Walmart deliberately helping their workers go on public assistance. Seeing as I already have to pay Walmart's workers out of my tax dollars, I'm not going to give them another dime.
Oh, and when I buy a product on Amazon, I'm more or less guaranteed the actual product, not the "Walmart version" of the product, which is typically made on the cheap using inferior components. I used to work with Walmarts supply chain and quality control arms at a previous job, they strong arm companies into meeting price points. In order to do this those companies typically just make a new SKU of garbage quality to sell at Walmart.
And it's delivered to my door. If I have to drive out to the store to pick up my purchase I've kind of defeated the entire reason I had it delivered in the first place.
So no, Walmart.com is NOT coming on strong. At least not if you can afford to shop anywhere else. If you can't afford to shop elsewhere, that's another story-- though I do feel bad that people shopping there end up with garbage products. Unfortunately you get what you pay for.
It seems more to prevent people from paying $10 and binge-watching all of Amazon's exclusives in a single month.
THIS. Or, at the very least, this is probably part of the decision making process. I doubt there's any one issue.
* greed/wanting more money... this doesn't make sense as a reason, because it relies on the chance that people will still get the monthly sub, which is more expensive than the yearly sub.
* seasonal shipping.. this is probably part of the reason.
* binge watching amazon exclusives (or other vids)... prime video alone, IMO, isn't worth the full prime price. If someone isn't reaping many of the other benefits, then a periodic binge on a one month sub is the only way it'd make sense.... and then, who cares if it's a few bucks more?
* possibly a buffer in prep for the lack of Net Neutrality... if they need to start shelling out cash for fast lanes to ISP's, that has to come from somewhere
If they had had a monthly option when I signed up, and it was close to the same price, I would have gone monthly only when needed/wanted.