Monthly or Annual - How Do Members Pay for Amazon Prime?
Amazon ‘s success is built on millions of good decisions - from product selection to user experience design, and from offering cloud storage through Amazon Web Services to inviting third-party sellers to expand the retail offering. Famously, it is built on testing and abandoning lots of bad ideas, too. We think the creation of Amazon Prime was the most important one.
Of course, Amazon discloses very little about Amazon Prime, even such basics as how many members it has.
After nine years of offering only annual Amazon Prime memberships, seven of those years at the same $79 introductory price, in December 2016 Amazon started offering a monthly-pay Prime membership option at $10.99 per month, alongside the $99 annual fee. Today, members can pay either $139 per year or $14.99 per month, so the monthly subscription costs $180 per year or almost 30% more than the annual subscription.
About half of Amazon Prime members are willing to pay for the flexibility and budget-friendliness of monthly payments for Amazon Prime membership. (Chart 1).