In a letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos has revealed that Amazon now have more than 100 million paid Prime members globally. Doing the maths, based on UK subscription costs, that’s some £7,900,000,000 paid annually in club membership for Amazon Prime. Seven point nine billion pounds paid to Amazon by customers just for the privilege of free shipping (and a ton of other benefits)!
Amazon also revealed that in 2017 Amazon shipped more than five billion items with Prime worldwide, and more new members joined Prime than in any previous year. That means that the average Prime member buys fifty items per year, roughly one a week, which by any retailer’s standards is a pretty damn good repeat purchase rate.
In 2017, for the first time in Amazon’s history, more than half of the units sold on Amazon worldwide were from third-party merchants.
Amazon’s Global Selling program (enabling SMBs to sell products across national borders) grew by over 50% in 2017 and cross-border ecommerce by SMBs now represents more than 25% of total third party sales.
In total, 2 million merchants now sell on Amazon around the world and Amazon have 560,000 employees making them one of the largest employers in the world.
What this should be telling you is that Prime is without question a huge success and that Prime subscribers will want to access the benefit of free expedited shipping. There are only two ways to get your products included in Prime – either place your inventory in Amazon’s warehouses under their FBA program or qualify for Seller Fulfilled Prime.
4 Responses
Bezo,s said prime membership world wide exceeded 100 million so let’s up it a bit to say 110 million members.
If we say that Germany, Britain, EU have 15 million members, Japan, India Asia have another 15 million members. Then that would mean that America has around 80 million prime members.
News outlets this year have been reporting that Amazon has 90 million America prime subscribers and our guesstimate makes Amazon 80 million which is 10 million lower that what has been reported.
Prime is definitely the game changer and is one of the reasons why Amazon has become so successful in retail.
The largest market is the b2b market which is X4 larger than b2c if Amazon can do to b2b what it has done to b2c then Amazon will reach that 1 trillion market capitalisation.
Seller fulfilled prime is a complete bind for sellers. we have to stump up for the expedited shipping and if, as happened to me, a next day delivery falls on a Saturday during a Bank Holiday, Amazon refund the customer even though they have received the goods.
Amazon is huge, of course (too big, IMHO). But it was reported yesterday that Alibaba has overtaken Amazon as the world’s most visited ecommerce platform. The battle is not over yet.
Thanks Mike. Good tip off.