Amazon’s new Prime Expansion team is adding more perks to the platform

Amazon is hiring some new team members to improve and enhance the Amazon Prime membership package.

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Currently, an $80-per-year membership gets you free, fast shipping and some media freebies. But if you’re not a die-hard online shopper or streaming media junkie, $80 annually can seem like a lot.

The new employees will be charged with “Prime Expansion” and dreaming up new benefits for Amazon Prime members, as well as marketing the service and pushing it into new geographical regions.

A full listing of Prime-related job listings at Amazon reveals the company is working on “awesome new business opportunities” for digital subscriptions, launching Prime services in Italy and Spain, working with major studios to improve the site’s Instant Video offerings, and creating new designs to get more members onboard.

As we read in a few of these job descriptions:

“We are going through a period of dramatic evolution, working on new benefits and pairing Prime with some of our top strategic marketing initiatives including Amazon Student and Amazon Mom…

The Prime Expansion team is aggressively driving innovations and architectural designs that will allow the program to be easily expanded to allow Prime customers to enjoy benefits on a growing list of Amazon locales and beyond. Our core team mission is to enable the right Prime programs in new places (on and off Amazon) by designing flexible software architectures that will allow for a rapid expansion of the Prime program everywhere!

The Amazon Prime Expansion team is a great place to grow your career. Our roadmap is bursting with opportunity for engineers to bring their best (and then some), solve intriguing challenges, and tangibly impact the customer experience on and off Amazon Come join our team where fun, smart, passionate engineers challenge and support one another in pursuit of goals that have a huge impact on our customers and the company.

Of course, it’s kind of a given that Amazon would want to improve its current offering of virtual products and services; that’s more or less par for the course. What’s interesting is the timing of this rapid acceleration of Prime offerings.

Prime first launched its instant video service as an incentive for new members back in February 2011. However, one year later, Amazon Prime membership was still much lower than anticipated. As Amazon continues to grow in all its other offerings — from its massive Kindle adoption to its cloud hosting services — Prime can’t be allowed to lag behind.

hat tip: All Things D

Image courtesy of Vladimir Gerasimov, Shutterstock

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