What Makes Amazon Prime Members So Great?
Does Amazon Prime membership make great shoppers, or do great shoppers become Amazon Prime members? Either answer would be good news for Amazon. Either way, Amazon Prime members are a collection of very active shoppers.
We are endlessly curious about Amazon Prime. Recently, we affirmed it continues to grow in the US, although more slowly than in the early years, and that Prime members spend about twice as much as non-Prime customers. This latter difference has persisted for several years and is evidence that Amazon Prime members are very important customers.
We identify the components of Amazon Prime member spending: how often customers shop at Amazon.com and how much they spend each trip. The math is straightforward. Annual spending is the average order multiplied by the number of orders per year.
The clear difference between Prime members and non-Prime customers is how frequently they shop at Amazon. Our most recent data shows that US Amazon Prime members shop more than twice as often as non-Prime customers (Chart 1). On average, Prime members shop at Amazon a little more than twice each month, while non-Prime customers shop monthly.