US Amazon Prime Membership Has Found Its Limit

In our first Amazon Substack Report, we asked if Amazon Prime Membership in the US had plateaued. There was early indication that was the case. And now, six months later, with two more quarters of survey data, the answer is becoming clearer.

Amazon discloses very little about the Prime subscriber count, other than the occasional “over X” announcement when another 9-figure barrier has been surpassed globally - 100 million in 2018 and 200 million last year. CIRP estimates both the total US membership and the penetration into the total Amazon customer base, though we look at the number of individuals with use of an Amazon Prime membership, rather than the number of paying Amazon Prime households.

Based on these estimates, we find that Prime membership has essentially stopped growing in the US, after many years of extremely fast growth, and then modest growth in the last two or three years.