Amazon Raises Annual Prime Price 20% to $119
wsj.com
wsj.com
• Prime Video is losing selection to "channels" that require extra payment on its own platform.
• Prime shipping is no longer certain to be two days.
• Those which are assured to arrive within two days don't always do so, but I never get a credit for that delay against my prime membership for a failure to meet their SLA even though I'm supposedly covered with some sort of guarantee.
• Prime shipping is no longer certain to source from Amazon warehouses.
• "Add-on items" — items that don't ship alone because they're too small/cheap.
• "Prime Pantry" — select non-perishable everyday items which inexplicably don't qualify for prime shipping even though variants of the same item may be sold under regular Prime rules.
• And worst of all: Amazon commingles Amazon-sourced with FBA merchandise. I've had numerous issues with counterfeits from "sold by Amazon" listings in the last two years because of this.
Disabled auto renewal. This broke the camel's back.
If you are not using this card, you are leaving money on the table. This benefit is easily worth an increase of 20 bucks a year. You will still come out ahead.
This is the only thing Amazon has done annoying enough to get me to buy elsewhere (other than, occasionally, price comparisons).
I would have grudgingly accepted that if they'd just said "sorry, they're too expensive to ahip individually" but their PR kept spinning a tale about hugely expanded range.
Instead I started buying small items on eBay, paying the small amount of postage required, which led to buying bigger things and eventually barely looking at Amazon any more.
We recently cancelled because of customer service issues with Amazon, but we are close to signing up again. I'm on the fence, but my wife just assumes we'll be back on the wagon, that it's our 'default state'. It makes me wonder whether that by itself is good or bad.
Our household saves more on delivery fees then annual subscription price and you get access to their movies and TV shows, plus other prime stuff (early access to items, etc.)
I think some will be turned off but it won't really be a lot of folks at the end of the day.
Are you sure? Amazon has free shipping for orders over $25, if you didn't have that "free" shipping, how many times would you pay for shipping versus consolidating multiple orders? Would you count on free 2-day shipping or order far enough ahead to get the free shipping.
I'm a long-time prime member when when my renewal comes up, I'm not sure I'm going to renew. Since I'm already a Netflix subscriber and the Amazon "free prime" catalog is worse than Netflix, prime video is not much of a draw for me
Most items on amazon I can get next day for free. Sometimes it saved my bacon (forgetting a gift or some household item) and sometimes I just get what I want faster. That aspect is very appealing to me.
If they remove the next day shipping or start charging I will reconsider because it won’t make sense to wait for stuff that I can easily go to a store and buy.
So yeah, they have free shipping but not on next day delivery.
Most people would like the first benefit more than the second. If you're a farmer, maybe you want the manure, but to most people that "benefit" doesn't apply. Is my average customer sarcastic in claiming that all my service offers is two day shipping? No. That's just the only part of the service they would ever care about.
I would bet that most prime customers are interested specifically in the shipping, so to them the fringe benefits are irrelevant.
Again - I bet you that most people care about the shipping and nothing else. That is an important fact when considering the value prime offers.
Amazon is trying to leverage their dominant market position to enter video streaming, music streaming, ... etc.. And have customers pay higher rates on top of that. At some point that becomes abuse of monopoly.
I'm sure the economists at Amazon have done the analysis. Now that the market is cornered and inelastic, revenues will increase with rising prices.
Spotify is ~$120 per year Netflix is ~$110-$130 per year
Amazon Prime comes with a plethora of auxillary benefits like Amazon Video and Music, Prime day deals, magazine subscriptions, and many more that I'm probably leaving out. Considering all this, $119 per year doesn't seem like all that much. It's still less than ten bucks a month.
What is Prime offering again? Prime Music is a poor, unlimited trial. It was a great benefit.
And I've never found anything worth buying on Prime Day - it seems like a marketing gimmick crossed with an opportunity for Amazon to clear out the junk at the back of their warehouses.
I like the convenience of Prime shipping, so I've tried to justify keeping it, but I just can't. It might be worth it if PrimeNow had a better selection in my area, or if Fresh were (1) available in my area and (2) not ludicrously expensive. As it stands, I don't get my money's worth from Prime shipping, and none of the other benefits seem to be worth using.
- I still get everything in two days.
- I never get third party merchandise accidentally.
- Amazon has, bar none, the best customer support and return experience of any company I've ever ordered from. Most of the time they just tell me to keep the product. If there were any issues at all, I just mention that and the return is free. Otherwise I will pay the small return shipping cost if I just decided I didn't like something.
Every now and then I have to visit a physical store for something and I wonder how much of my life I've saved ordering from Amazon, especially after I signed up for Prime which made it much more reasonable to buy pretty much everything from there.
Prime was great when it launched here in the UK, now it's so unreliable in many places that it's completely worthless. The primary reason I used it (and I used it from the very first day) was for the 1-day postage. I think it's 2 days in the US, but frankly our country is pretty tiny so it's not exactly optimistic to do 1 day delivery when the Royal Mail can get me a parcel at 9am in South Wales that was posted at 5pm in the Scottish Highlands the day before.
I had a single parcel delivered on time in the past year, all the rest would be at least a day late. I live on what is essentially a ring-road of Cardiff, and it's insanely easy to deliver to me. There's one of the older Amazon depots within about 45 minutes of my flat, and I think a new one over near Bristol now.
My apartment block has banned Amazon's couriers from leaving parcels with the concierge, because they would rock up, pretend to deliver parcels/eat their lunch, then dump 30 parcels in the concierge office. So now they just dump them outside doors, indicating when you aren't home. They can't even deliver to the Amazon Lockers nearby within the delivery window, and the lockers are nearly always full because we have so few other options.
I've spent the past few months actively seeking to purchase everything via alternative vendors in the UK, and overall, I don't miss Amazon in the slightest. Although eBuyer also sucks (no weekend customer services, wut).
I'm so glad Waterstones is back on form here too; it feels quite poetic to ditch Amazon for its original purpose as a bookstore. Good riddance to them.
> Starting May 11, 2018, new members will be charged $119/year for an annual Prime membership and $59/year for an annual Prime Student membership.
> Starting June 16, 2018, existing Prime members with an annual membership will renew at a rate of $119/year. Prime Student members with an annual membership will renew at a rate of $59/year.
> Monthly Prime members continue to pay $12.99 per month. Monthly Prime Student members continue to pay $6.49 per month.
If it’s coming from an Amazon warehouse and has multiple sellers, you have no way of knowing who supplied the product you’re receiving. Could be Amazon, could be some random dude.
Hard to say if I'll stay but it feels like a lot of companies are doing this. Netflix has done it as well... I feel companies are running out of ideas to scale their business and so they just say, "Wait a fucking second... our product is awesome! It's worth more!" I kind of wonder how long this will last.
If there is a single sign-on option which provides good enough data safety & privacy, lot of my shopping will move away from Amazon to this virtual YC 2019 company.