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Jeff Bezos Reveals That Amazon Has Over 100 Million Prime Subscribers (theverge.com)
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos revealed today that the company has over 100 million Prime members, "marking the first time in the 13-year history of Amazon offering its Prime membership that the company has ever revealed its number of subscribers," reports The Verge. From the report: According to Bezos, Amazon Prime also saw its best year ever in 2017, with the company shipping over five billion products with Prime and signing up more new members than in any previous year. Also revealed today, Whole Foods Market will discontinue its rewards program on May 2 and fold it into Amazon Prime. "Stay tuned for additional announcements for Amazon Prime members," reads the Whole Foods FAQ page focused on digital coupons, rewards and online accounts. "Any account benefits, including membership and/or unused rewards, will not roll into any future programs."
So, we decided to continue it... She has next day delivery and still has video on demand (albeit, not Netflix). She's happy.
What I didn't like is that your normally should be able to share some of the Prime membership advantages with other people in the household. I thought: sweet! I can get next-day delivery too now on my account. Yeah, well, turns out, that sharing feature isn't available in Luxembourg. Yes, I contacted support about it. They confirmed it's not available in my region. Sad.
Oh, well, usually when I order stuff, I can wait... There is no way, I pay for a second prime membership though.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
But only 2 million asked for it.
I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.
Not me not ever. I stay away from Amazon as much as possible because I keep reading how they treat their employees like shit.
... in six months when they make another order.
Are there really many people that order so infrequently? I just checked my order history, and my family and I placed 87 Amazon orders last year. That is about twice a week on average. In addition, we watched 124 Amazon videos.
I can understand people like my mom, who has never ordered anything on-line ever. But once you get past that, and you see the convenience and vastly greater selection available, why would you ever give that up?
I'm one of them, but mostly through inertia. On the whole it's getting worse, with next day slipping to two days, 'guaranteed next day' being delivered two days later, and items on sale with free Prime delivery, but mysteriously more expensive than the non-Prime version alone and magically equal to non-Prime + delivery fee.
It's kinda ok, and I enjoyed The Tick, but on the whole...meh.
Prime is cheaper and has other features, but comparing P and N for video interfaces, subtitles, dubbing, search... Netflix is way better.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Sure, when you're offering it in countries like India for INR 999... which is the equivalent of about $15/yr. There are plenty of people there that can afford that (and yes, plenty who can't, but at over 1.3 bln people it only takes less than 10% of them to reach 100m) so of course your subscription numbers are going to inflate like crazy.
How many of these people became prime members accidentally after clicking on "yes, ship with item for free with amazon prime two day shipping" without reading the fine print that they need to pay a hundred bucks for yearly membership?
Amazon prime is probably only interesting if you use their video on demand services.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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Are there really many people that order so infrequently?
Some but they are the same sorts that have a Costco membership and go once a quarter.
I can understand people like my mom, who has never ordered anything on-line ever. But once you get past that, and you see the convenience and vastly greater selection available, why would you ever give that up?
Exactly. I do a lot of shopping through Amazon and a few other online places and it has been life changing. It is FAR more convenient for me to have stuff delivered for most of what I buy. I still go to stores occasionally for stuff I need Right Now or if it's conveniently located (like on my commute) or for groceries. But I place somewhere around 100 orders through Amazon and other places a year. The amount of time I save not having to drive around to randomly located stores in my limited free time is hugely helpful.
Not me not ever. I stay away from Amazon as much as possible because I keep reading how they treat their employees like shit.
Do you avoid buying clothing from overseas sweatshops? Do you only buy produce picked by well paid white people? How consistent are you really about your claims to the moral high ground?
I'm always puzzled about claims like this which seem more like self aggrandizement rather than a genuine moral stance. If you want to bash Amazon go ahead (plenty to critique) but don't pretend you really are so ethically superior or that you really care about worker conditions.
Amazon prime is probably only interesting if you use their video on demand services.
Umm, no. I make light use of the video services but HEAVY use of their two day shipping. The video is just a nice little bonus. The real value to me comes from their ability to consistently find and deliver stuff I need in a timely manner for reasonable prices without a lot of fuss and excellent return policies when needed.
Amazon prime is interesting if you use their video service and order a lot with them. For me it does actually work out. I got rid of TV and all other streaming subs, and while I could probably do without the prime videos, they're a nice additional bonus.
On a completely unrelated note, Jeff, my last paycheck for shilling bounced, could you look into it?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I used to order a lot from Amazon. Their prices were nearly always the lowest, and at the time I didn't have to pay tax.
Amazon has always had good prices but they never were the lowest if you were willing to do the work of hunting around. The value is that they have (generally) good prices and awesomely broad selection and reliable two day delivery with Prime. Amazon is just hugely convenient compared to most of the alternatives which is why they've been such a success. As for tax you'll just have to get over that. Sales tax is coming to internet sales in one form or another and that won't be just through Amazon.
some of their business practices irritate me.
Is there any company that does not fit this description? I haven't found one yet. I guess it depends on what is important to you.
still order from them but first try finding it somewhere else at a competitive price. And will never pay for Prime.
Nothing wrong with shopping around if you feel a better deal is important to you. For me I just want a reasonable price and minimal hassle which Amazon is quite good at. As for "never pay for Prime" that's fine too but frankly much of the value of Amazon comes from their Prime service. I find it hugely valuable but your mileage may vary. If I didn't have it I doubt I would order nearly as much from Amazon. I think you need to order something like 50+ deliveries per year to really make it worthwhile. I think last year my average freight charge on Prime deliveries worked out to about $0.72 per delivery. I realize some of the cost is rolled into the product price but even so it is a fantastic deal for me given my shopping preferences.
That is ten billion dollars from prime alone.
Amazon bashing...meh...OK.
In the meantime...I buy from Amazon more often than not, NOT because they have the lowest price, but simply for the convenience. Into "convenience", I factor in:
1). Timely shipments.
2). One-stop shopping.
3). "Known factor".
4). Payments and Addresses.
5). Record of purchases.
Amazon can get stuff delivered to me in a timely fashion. Two days "free". In the meantime, I ordered something from E-Trailer that is "in stock" on Monday and it is currently scheduled to arrive on Saturday. I leave on my trip on Friday. Had Amazon had it, I would have bought it from them, even if it cost more.
2). Where else can I get Dr. Pepper Stubbs BBQ sauce, a Bluetooth headphones receiver unit and a box of small Trojan condoms all in one shipment? I mean, that's awesome!
3). I know what I'm going to get when I order from Amazon. I know they will ship, I know the return policy and that I will not have issues, I know the order system, etc. I don't have to guess how I will be treated, like I do when I order from somewhere new.
4). They have my payment info. They have my shipping addresses. They have my billing address. I don't have to enter any of that shit again, like I do when ordering from somewhere new. That makes things fast and easy. I can decode I want to order something, to find it on their site and complete my purchase in 60 seconds, in some cases. 2-3 minutes tops in others. Yeah, I will pay extra for that.
5). I like having my order history in one place. If I wonder, "when did I buy this" or "how much did I pay for this", it is very easy to come up with this information, quickly. If I order from somewhere else, the first thing I have to figure out is "where did I order this from?" Then I go to their site and have to figure out what my login info is. Then if I get logged in, maybe I can find my info, maybe not, depending on how long ago it was. In the meantime - just the other day I was wondering about my headphones and I went on Amazon and quickly determined I got them in 2012 for $500. That made me feel a lot better about ordering a set of replacement earpads for $15 or so.
So yeah, overall, maybe Amazon doesn't always have the best price. But if Amazon is only a little more than the next guy, I will order from them. If it is an item I can get for $10 at some random place, no, I'm not going to pay $20 at Amazon. But if it is an item I can get for $500 at some random place, then, yeah, sure, I'll pay $510 or maybe $515 from Amazon. If for no other reason than I know I will not have issues returning the item without hassle, if that's what I need to do.
Back in the good old pre-Prime days, Amazon delivered within 2-3 days. Standard.
And you generally paid a handsome freight charge for it. Yes they are encouraging you to use Prime and prior to Prime I didn't use Amazon much. If you don't like it there are other places to shop and that's totally fine. I don't understand why people get so bent out of shape over something that is 100% optional. If it's valuable to you get a Prime membership. If it is not valuable to you, that's fine too. I don't shop much at Walmart because they don't offer me a value proposition that works for me for example. I don't have a Costco membership because I wouldn't go there often enough to justify it. Use what works for you.
Unless you pay about as much as a prime subscription for the once-normal 2-3 days. Of course you could also sign up for Prime and get the 2-3 days again for "free"...
Of course it isn't free. But if you order enough stuff it's really economical. I think my average freight cost last year was something like $0.72 per package which is a darn good deal.
Thats coz the bastards wont let you cancel immediately now, they keep your membership active till the end of the one year and charge you for that period.
Are there really many people that order so infrequently? I just checked my order history, and my family and I placed 87 Amazon orders last year.
Checking mine...so far this year (April 19th), I've got in 12 orders on 18 items, and my wife has got in 14 orders on 21 items. If you extrapolate that out for the rest of the year, you end up with something along the lines of 88 orders and 131 items. That's about 1 order every 4 days on average. On any given day, there's about a 25% chance one of us is placing an order from Amazon. On average, we probably get something from Amazon every week of the year. EVERY WEEK.
So.........there you go (:
So your excuse for ignoring these human rights abuses is to say that everyone's doing it? Nice clean hands you have there.
Never claimed to have clean hands. What I do have is perspective. I'm annoyed by people that pretend to have clean hands with a bogus boycott when their real purpose has nothing to do with worker rights. I'm annoyed by people like you who act all self righteous and try to drag down others despite their own hypocrisy. Or are you going to pretend you are somehow really doing something meaningful about the problem?
And frankly if you think Amazon is really engaged in "human rights abuses" then you really don't know what the term means. Modestly tougher than average working conditions at a place with 100% voluntary employment isn't exactly what I consider abusive. I've visited literal sweat shops in third world countries so I know what the word means first hand.
Whereas your public proclamation of your own moral superiority is motivated from a desire to be a role model to the youth of the world?
Nice strawman. Exactly where did I claim to be a moral paragon? As opposed to you who are trying to drag me down to make yourself look good.
I read this story title and went SHIT! I forgot to cancel that prime trial!
I will give kudos to Amazon for making my few days late cancellation easy, and the refund of the money they took automatic. Well, automatic in theory, I've still got to verify it. I was expecting to have to berate some Indian customer service rep, so it was a pleasant surprise.
Why? What would cause that?
Maybe I'm part of your 2% but I tried Prime for a month a while back, saw that I basically get nothing out of it, and canceled at the end of the trial. It was going to cost money and get me virtually nothin'.
What might make more sense is: if you have a computer, you probably have an Amazon account. Probably. (I could accept that's 98%.) But Amazon Prime? It costs money and unless you do a lot of shopping on Amazon (e.g. you've fired Costco, etc) it's not particularly compelling.
Not that I think people who do it are stupid. Maybe they're always in a hurry for everything, or like I said, they stopped going to stores because they live in an area with great delivery service, or whatever. But it's really hard to believe that'd be anywhere near 98%. Maybe 50%? I don't know.
Though it conflicts with my experience, I'm not really saying you're wrong, but .. you didn't explain why.
And same goes for Netflix. It needs weird software and I don't do that, so...? Netflix never made their case to me so they're still waiting for their first dollar. At least Amazon got me to try it for a month.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
No, I'm dead serious. Until about 3 years ago, I'd get my stuff from Amazon within 2-3 days as standard delivery, free of charge.
Interesting. I wonder if you must have been located close to one of their distribution hubs because I certainly did not have that experience. Free shipping for me without Prime even back in the day took the better part of a week most of the time. Still fine for most items (I'm not usually in a hurry) but not as fast as with Prime. I could pay for faster delivery but it wasn't free or cheap.
Is this the club one joins for the privilege of paying $100 a year to get some marginal discounts in buying from them?
The details vary a bit between countries but in the UK you pay £7.99 a month or £79 per year in advance. By default it auto-renews but you can turn that off.
For that you get among other things.
Free next day delivery including weekends on most products.
Some exclusive products and deals
A video on demand service.
A music on demand service
For comparison next day delivery without prime costs £5.99 so if you want to use next day delivery more than once in a month it's cheaper to buy prime.
Do the club members get a free "I'm an idiot" t-shirt?
No.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Not everyone is that big of a consumerist nor has a big family. I do most of my non-grocery shopping on Amazon, but that that's no more than a handful of orders a year.
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Ditto here. Every time I look at Prime Video (and Amazon asks me all of the time, "HOLY SHIT, DO YOU KNOW YOU GET VIDEOS?") I find little I'm interesting in watching. The videos aren't a draw for me.
Ordering furnace filters and pet toys and birthday presents at discount rates and having them show up 2 days later is the draw.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
...I tried Prime for a month a while back, saw that I basically get nothing out of it...
I find this baffling. Did you really try prime?
The other day I noticed that my dress pants were starting to get a little raggedy. So I went to amazon, went to my orders, typed in "pants", and up popped the last two times I ordered these pants. I added 2 to the cart, checked out, and they showed up 2 days later. I spent probably about 2 minutes total buying pants, and I got the exact ones I wanted in the exact size I needed.
They showed up sooner than I could find a spare hour or two to drive to the mall, park, walk to the store, and then search through rack after rack looking for pants in my size. And if, for some bizarre reason these ones don't fit me? I put them back in the reclosable bag, click the return button on the order, print the label, tape it on the bag, and leave it under my mailbox to get picked up. It's faster and easier to do a return via Amazon that dealing with my local store.
I have 10 minutes to jump onto Amazon's website far more often than I have an hour or two to play scavenger hunt at my local stores. In time savings alone, Prime pays for itself. The free 2 day shipping and discounts just sweeten the pot.
If you don't value your time, I guess Amazon isn't worth shopping at. But if you value it at all, Amazon generally crushes everyone else.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
That is about 1 in 16 households world-wide. Wow. It is also 50% greater than the number of people that voted for the US president in 2016 and are now likely cranked that he is messing with our free shipping. Good thing for him that most are outside of the US and therefore do not get a say in the matter.
The letter also points out that 5+ Billion items were shipped via prime last year. That is a stack approximating the distance to the moon (with very sloppy math). It is also about 50 items per prime account. Given that each shipment probably averages two items (mine do), I don't think Amazon is losing any money on this deal.
I rarely use Amazon to use its subscription. In fact, I hate subscriptions.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
The video service is actually what got me to sign up.
I wanted to watch The Man In The High Castle and fully intended to cancel my membership before the free trial was over but I didn't and I now make a habit of ordering things several times a month whereas before that I had only ordered one item in the 5 years before I finally got Prime.
Nowadays I almost never watch anything on their video service. I'm still a Netflix subscriber and I haven't finished watching all of their stuff too and they keep producing more.
I never even finished watching all of The Man in the High Castle but yesterday I did spend just over $100 on stuff I expect to receive very soon.
Did you really try prime?
The other day I noticed that my dress pants were starting to get a little raggedy. So I went to amazon, went to my orders, typed in "pants", and up popped the last two times I ordered these pants. I added 2 to the cart, checked out, and they showed up 2 days later. I spent probably about 2 minutes total buying pants, and I got the exact ones I wanted in the exact size I needed
So just like regular non-Prime Amazon then. Why would you pay extra for this?
Well, I got one Amazon delivery last year - which arrived in two instalments on different days, as expected. I'm about half way through that pile of books.
Who wants to wait the three of four days for delivery, when by going to the shop you can get what you need off the shelf there and then? Books are still the only thing I actually use Amazon for, and even then they're not my most regular book supplier because they've not got many that interest me.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
What is the number of people in the markets that Amazon "does" prime in? USA is 3*10^8 ; Europe 7.4*10^8 ; someone mentioned India has Prime service, so that's 13*10^8. I don't know if it's available in Russia - I'll ask Tebya Valentina next time we call her - or in China. But so far that's 1.0*10^8 subscribers out of a population of 23.4*10^8 potential customers. A bit less than 5%.
Sounds a bit less impressive like that?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"