Is US Prime Membership Tracking or Beating the Market?

As we continue to track Amazon Prime membership in the US, we observed that growth has slowed. We also hypothesized that the current growth pattern generally reflects the increase in US e-commerce retail sales. In other words, as US retail customers become more comfortable shopping online, their retail spending moves online, often to Amazon. Many join Amazon Prime to support their growing online shopping habits.

In an email exchange, a Substack reader asked specifically about that growth. They suggested that we compare Amazon Prime member growth to a reliable measure of US online retail shopping - FRED data from the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank.

Since 2020, just after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, we see how Prime membership has tracked US E-Commerce Sales growth fairly directly (Table 1). From 2020 to 2024, our estimate of US Prime membership grew 37% and US E-Commerce Sales grew the same 37%. The chart also includes our current mid-year (2025) US Amazon Prime member estimate.