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Comment by jmccree | Hacker News Reader

Last I heard amazon was losing an average of $11/yr on prime subscribers. They are relatively famous for caring little about making a profit in the short term. I'm not sure how often you order from Amazon, but just a few overnight $4/orders and you can save the $80 easily. I've bought multiple pieces of furniture off amazon with free 2 day shipping. I don't want to know how much that would have cost me.

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You're being tricked. The saving are artificial.

They clearly normally overcharge for two day shipping. Just because it says it costs 15 bucks to send the widget, doesn't mean they pay $15 when you ship it with Prime.

Most people that opt for faster shipping and are willing to fork over money are people that need something urgently and are willing to pay extra. Amazon obviously exploits that.

While it's true that they don't seem to care too much about profits, it's naiive to think they have a program where they just throw money away for the sake of an increase in volume. There is no long term way to "cash out" and turn that volume into money. Once you drop the incentives or raise the prices your customers simply leave to the next cheap online retailer.

They posted over 3 billion dollars in shipping losses in 2012 and are currently saying they will likely increase the cost of prime soon. Perhaps if you haven't used prime you may not realize how much many prime subscribers use it, I'm not being tricked. Looking over the past few years of my amazon orders, I average 50-100 orders per year. I know they have good shipping rates, but I doubt it's less than $2/package for at min 2day.

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