Amazon Prime may be the most ingenious and effective customer loyalty program in all of e-commerce, Brad Stone says, if not retail in general:
Analysts describe Prime as one of the main factors driving Amazon’s stock price — up 296 percent in the last two years — and the main reason Amazon’s sales grew 30 percent during the recession while other retailers flailed. At the same time, Prime has proven exceedingly difficult for rivals to copy: It allows Amazon to exploit its wide selection, low prices, network of third-party merchants, and finely tuned distribution system, while also keying off that faintly irrational human need to maximize the benefits of a club you have already paid to join.
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The company declines to disclose specifics about the program, though analysts estimate it has more than 4 million members in the U.S., a small slice of Amazon’s 121 million active buyers worldwide. Analysts say Prime members increase their purchases on the site by about 150 percent after they join and may be responsible for as much as 20 percent of Amazon’s overall sales in the U.S. The company’s executives acknowledge only that the program gets people to buy more — and more kinds of items — on the site. “In all my years here, I don’t remember anything that has been as successful at getting customers to shop in new product lines,” says Robbie Schwietzer, vice-president of Amazon Prime and an eight-year veteran of the company.