Amazon now requiring Prime membership to buy popular Blu-rays | Hacker News Reader

Amazon now requiring Prime membership to buy popular Blu-rays

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20 pointsocdtrekkie13 comments

Some interesting data about prime:

- Estimated at 40 - 50 million members(1)

- Estimated at $4 - 5 billion in revenue (1)

- That revenue = ~15.5% of Amazon's total revenue, incidentally this is just subscription revenue, not the money spent by the customers on purchases(1)

- Prime is growing 50% year over year (2)

- Prime members spend almost 3x a year vs. average customer (2)

So in that light you have to imagine that:

a) Prime members are dramatically more profitable than the average customer.

b) Acquiring more prime members > some pissed off shoppers that don't want to take a free trial

So in that light it doesn't seem like a huge stretch that Amazon starts packaging Prime with discounts on certain products, especially on razor-thin margin products to push the model.

And of course you also have Jet.com getting huge press for essentially being a "subscription only" ecommerce site.

(1) http://www.pymnts.com/in-depth/2015/prime-turns-amazon-profi...

(2) http://www.geekwire.com/2015/amazon-prime-memberships-grow-5...

(3) http://www.wsj.com/articles/startup-jet-coms-goal-20-billion...

I'm sure this is less painful for people who still have the 30-day trial available to them. To everyone else, it's a $99 minimum cost to buy a $10 product.

But it definitely seems like this, combined with the new Prime commercials I've been seeing is a big push to get their regular customers moved over to Amazon Prime.

This does seem counterproductive to sales and conversion... I can understand wanting to offer different prices to Prime customers, but wouldn't you want to up-sell them with a discount?

  Divergent on Blu-Ray - $17, or sign up for Prime and get it for $13 with FREE SHIPPING!

How is this not a universally better offer?

For selected Blu-rays, the Buy button has entirely been removed in favor of a "Get Prime" button.

Currently you can see this at: Wreck-It Ralph, Divergent, Hot Tub Time Machine 2, Expendables 3, Red 2, and more.

I am a Prime member and find this rather unpleasant - on Divergent, a DVD releases 9 months ago (viewed when signed out of my Amazon account): http://i.imgur.com/EqPn2Dw.png

I mean, I get the exclusive pricing, which they've done on their hardware before. But to not even let you buy it from them unless you have Prime, even at a higher price? That irks me. And most users don't know where to find the third party sellers (which in most cases won't support super saver shipping and such).

It might be different out of the USA, but when I got into incognito mode and look at the Wreck-It Ralph Blue Ray I see this when clicking on more info:

http://i.imgur.com/tFz75kd.png

The last line is a link to other sellers.

Doesn't require incognito mode. You can buy any of those "prime only" Blurays from other sellers new, and even fulfilled by amazon.

I would think they would be more effective if they let people add items to their cart, but didn't force the 'Get Prime' on them until they went to select delivery options.

'Get Prime' means I'll get it in 2 days (or sooner). Or, I can 'Get Prime' and stream it now.

Sounds like a good dark pattern, classic godaddy. Let them think they can do something until they've become highly invested in the process, then bait and switch for the real gotcha.

http://darkpatterns.org/

I didn't mean it to be a bait and switch, where they couldn't buy the product without Prime. I meant that seems like the step they should try to upsell.

The customer is already thinking "How fast can I get it?", so that's the time to say "You can get it tomorrow if you had a Prime account". Or, you wait 5 days.

This seems to be similar to the Costco / Sam's Club membership model, but only on certain items. Costco's profits are largely from memberships, as items are sold close to cost. I imagine Amazon is selling these items at lower margin to the Prime members.

And I thought the local cinema here in Kyoto was crazy for only allowing paying members to buy a movie ticket more than 2 days in advance!

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