Amazon is now shipping more items through its two-day “free” Prime service than its Super Saver shipping for the first time ever, the company announced today.
[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":519855,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"business,","session":"A"}']Amazon first launched its Prime membership service back in 2005 as part of its strategy to lower the cost of shipping on a variety of items in exchange for a $79 annual fee. The company now offers its Prime two-day shipping on over 15 million items. (As usual, Amazon isn’t offering up any numbers on its total Prime subscribers.)
By contrast, Amazon’s “Super Saver Shipping” requires non-Prime members to spend at least $25 on any single customer order to render the shipping charges free. The company can do this because the $25 price per order allows them to conserve on overall shipping costs, much in the same way it can do with its Prime memberships.
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The move is significant: It shows that not only is Amazon signing up a sufficient number of Prime memberships, but those Prime members are also spending plenty of money with Amazon — perhaps instead of other retail chains both online and off.
Amazon is also giving people plenty of incentive to gain Prime membership, as it now offers a variety of movies and TV shows to watch via its Prime Instant Video service, which is available on Roku, Xbox, PS3, iPad, and, of course, the web.
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