Subscribe & Save May Be the Biggest Lever in Amazon’s Toolbox

Amazon Prime is the holy grail of declared customer affinity. Amazon’s 170 million Amazon Prime members are the envy of the retail world. But, to paraphrase Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner’s 2000 year-old man, there might be something bigger than Prime. 

We were surprised to see that Amazon Prime members with a Subscribe & Save (S&S) order are significantly bigger spenders than Amazon Prime members overall. Those customers’ S&S orders drive a large portion of the annual spending differential, and they spend more on everything else, too,

Only about 28% of Amazon Prime members have a Subscribe & Save order. (Non-Prime members can use Subscribe & Save, though they may incur shipping charges on some orders, and we do not consider them in this analysis.) The average US Prime Member spends $1,200 per year at Amazon. When we split Prime members into those with and those without an S&S order, a wide gap appears. Prime members with an S&S order spend more than twice as much annually as Prime members without an S&S order (Chart 1).