Amazon Is Considering Price Hike for Amazon Prime
Amazon said today that it is “considering” raising the price of Prim by $20 to $40. Prime is currently priced at $79.99 a year and you get free shipping, movies/tv, and a free book a month. The price change could bring Amazon Prime to $99.99 or $120.99 depending on what Amazon chooses to do. This could be a huge change to the company, and may even drive away new customers. This is not final, and the question is if old customers would have to pay more or get to keep their current plan pricing.
This was announced at Amazon’s fourth quarter earnings call with analysts. The reason CFO Tom Szkutak gave was higher shipping cost. If Amazon Prime went up this could match the price increase that Amazon put in lace for free shipping recently. Shipping this Christmas had a huge problem when it could not deliver all the packages being shipped on time for the big holiday.
The $79.99 price was easy for customers to justify because it gave them instant stream movies and TV and most importantly gave free shipping to over 19 million products on the Amazon website. There are tens of millions of customers using this service globally so a price increase could increase Amazon’s revenue. This is still just an idea and may never come to fruits this year, but Amazon does have need to increase the price.