The making of Amazon Prime, the internet's most devastating membership program
vox.com
vox.com
It looks to me like they went with something very similar to the 24h gym model - all these benefits which you don't end up using.
It's ok, you're probably not the market for vegas casinos either.
I'll use Amazon to rent movies now and again. When there's a new season of something like "The Man in the High Castle" or complete seasons of other stuff I like become available then I'll pay for just a month to watch these then cancel the sub again.
I also find it slightly annoying when Prime deliveries go from "Next day" to "Two days" randomly, especially around holiday seasons. I queried this with them giving examples of SKU's that two days before were available Next Day and then suddenly change to Two Day delivery despite being in stock, but it's like talking to a brick wall.
Perhaps in the US it's a different story where due to licensing there's a much larger selection of content available, but the UK Prime is a bit meagre.
I'd argue that copying this trend and tweaking the spreadsheets to extract money in a more fine grained manner while just cutting every dime on the lower tier is not exactly innovation. Holding this up on a pedestal as the great moment of triumph and creativity in tech is not really on the mark.
Rather timely also since Amazon announced this week that it’s working on one day deliveries for Prime customers.
And those in the know will tell you that same-day (even 2-4 hours!) deliveries are on the roadmap for Prime customers in major metro areas.
The package came the next day, and no extra cost to me. I've made two other orders since then, and they both arrived next day despite the order confirmation telling me 7-10 days.
I'm sure that there's some shipping infrastructure slack that allows them to do this, but I find it super strange now that I get prompted to pay an extra $10 for next-day shipping only to get it anyway.
I'm not used to us getting things before the US I guess :)
> And those in the know will tell you that same-day (even 2-4 hours!) deliveries are on the roadmap for Prime customers in major metro areas.
In Seattle we already have next day and same day shipping for a lot of merchandise. It drastically reduces the amount of time I spend in physical retailers.
Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
My dad was a member back in the 80's (and still is). Every time we wanted something, we would wait until he could get it at Costco -- which was further away than Walmart and K-mart -- "because I'm paying for the membership".
Amazon Prime is of course a lot more addictive because of the one-click, not-leaving-your-house thing. But the idea of retail memberships has been around for a long time. I think that psychology was well understood in the retail industry.
Some may think that is a subtle difference, but I think it’s huge and the effect is clear.
So far whenever I’ve wanted something from amazon I’ve been able to qualify for the free super saver shipping.