A Surprising Percentage of Amazon Customers Have or Had a Subscribe & Save Recurring Order!
As Amazon confronts a more challenging, competitive retail marketplace, Amazon (and CIRP) look at sources of growth and profitability. For a while we have followed Subscribe & Save (S&S), Amazon’s repeat ordering program, and we update our analysis this week. S&S seems to continue to grow steadily, strengthening Amazon’s bond with a growing share of customers.
Recall S&S allows Amazon customers to place and manage recurring orders. So, customers that need recurring refills of just about anything - pet food, shampoo, motor oil - can have products delivered on a regular schedule. Customers can start and stop these repeating orders whenever they want, on whatever schedule makes sense for them. They are rewarded with discounts in the 5% -10% range, based on the number of items in their recurring order, and they are enticed by discounts of as much as 40% for initiating a new S&S order. We’ve shown before that S&S customers are especially valuable to Amazon. Customers with an active S&S order spend more at Amazon.com, even beyond the annual value of their S&S order. So, S&S becomes an important signal about a customer’s overall loyalty to Amazon.
In 2024, 23% of US Amazon customers had an active S&S order (Chart 1). This is a slight increase over the previous two years. (CIRP began collecting data on S&S in 2022, so figures for 2022 are for only the second half of the year.)