Jeff Bezos is pulling the curtain back on Prime.
In his latest letter to shareholders, the Amazon CEO shared that Prime has more than 100 million subscribers globally.
This is the first time that Amazon has revealed just how many people pay for Prime. Estimates from analysts pegged it at about 90 million as recently as last year.
Bezos went on to explain how much Prime has expanded since it was founded 13 years ago. The membership now includes one-day and same-day shipping as well as the classic two-day shipping. Those benefits added up to a lot of packages — five billion items were shipped with Amazon Prime in 2017.
He also revealed that more new Prime members signed up in 2017 than any year prior. Globally, Amazon began offering Prime to residents in Mexico, Singapore, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg the same year.
“One thing I love about customers is that they are divinely discontent,” he writes in his letter. “Their expectations are never static — they go up. It’s human nature. We didn’t ascend from our hunter-gatherer days by being satisfied. People have a voracious appetite for a better way, and yesterday’s ‘wow’ quickly becomes today’s ‘ordinary’. I see that cycle of improvement happening at a faster rate than ever before.”
Prime members pay $99 a year, or $12.99 monthly, to have access to services such as free two-day shipping on certain purchases and unlimited streaming of movies and TV shows with Prime Video.
Not everyone has to pay full price for Prime. Amazon has been offering discounts for holders of EBT cards since June. EBT stands for Electronic Benefit Transfer, and these debit cards are the primary way that recipients of SNAP — otherwise known as food stamps — get their benefits. Amazon now offers the discount to Medicaid recipients as well. The discount is substantial: Amazon asks these lower-income customers to pay $6 a month.
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