Amazon Credit Cardholders are Great, but Elusive

Amazon Prime is great, but Amazon credit cardholders are the best. Amazon Visa and Amazon Store credit cardholders spend even more than run-of-the-mill Amazon Prime members. And needless to say, Amazon is very focused on using the levers they have to make their existing customers even better. Prime is the prime (pun intended) example; Subscribe & Save is another notable effort; and Amazon credit cards are certainly on the list.

For all of its marketing heft and presence among US consumers, Amazon has not grown its credit card business in the past five years. It’s a highly competitive market, of course, but even so we’d expect it to grow the penetration among Amazon customers at least a little.

Amazon continues to offer two credit cards, a Visa rewards card and a proprietary “store” card through Synchrony Bank. Both have a version for Prime members and a separate one for everyone else, with the Prime versions including a 5% reward on Amazon.com purchases. They’re just like other revolving credit card offerings, with balances, payments over time, and the rest.

The Amazon Visa card has held its own in the past five years, while the Synchrony store card has lost ground among Amazon.com customers. As of December 2024, 10% of Amazon.com customers have the Visa card, while 11% have the Synchrony store card (Chart 1).