Subscribe & Save Averages Drop But Amazon Still Wants Those Orders

With fall in the air and kids returning to school and campus, thoughts turn to … updating Subscribe & Save orders. We thought we would update our Subscribe & Save analysis, too.

Of course, Subscribe & Save (S&S) is the program that allows consumers to place a standing order at Amazon.com. They can do this for all sorts of products: groceries, household goods, apparel, or anything Amazon sells that could possibly lend itself to repeat ordering.

Earlier we showed how S&S makes even better customers out of Prime members, including average spending and loyalty. The percent of recent Amazon customers with an active Subscribe & Save order remains a little over 20% and the percent who had a Subscribe & Save order in the past remains at just over 10%. 

Slight shifts in the size and frequency of those orders can have a significant impact on the average value of a Subscribe & Save customer to Amazon, however. Both the size and frequency of Subscribe & Save orders appear to have declined somewhat in the past year, reducing the annual average retail value by almost 25% (Chart 1).