Believe It Or Not, Amazon Prime Could Spur You To Spend More Money

When browsing the Web late last week, I crossed the path of a headline that made me laugh out loud. “Amazon Prime Membership Should Come With a Warning“. At that point, I felt like it’d be a good idea to take the ORLY owl out of retirement, because I think that suggestion is rather obvious.

Beyond that non-revelation, though, just how successful is Prime, and how much money do Prime subscribers spend on average? Sadly, because Amazon is able to keep all such statistics secret, it does. ComScore can give us a hint to things, though: Prime members place twice as many orders as non-Prime members, and each transaction cost is about 40% higher.

Where my online habits are concerned, while I do use Amazon, I don’t feel too compelled to sign up for Prime. A big reason for this is that I simply don’t mind waiting a handful of days for a package to arrive – spending at least $25 gives me free (slower) shipping, and I’m fine with that.

However, after looking into this, I realized that if I were in the US, I’d sign up for Prime in a heartbeat. Yes, it should come as a surprise to no one that the Canadian version of Prime is lackluster. While the US version offers huge benefits with music listening, video watching, and book reading, Canadians are forced to settle with the shipping perk alone. Oh, and unlimited photo uploading – yay.

Nonetheless, I queried the Techgage team last night about their thoughts on Prime, and perhaps a little surprisingly, half have it, and all seem to admit that Prime does in fact spur them to spend more. There are a handful of reasons that make that happen, though.

As an example, Brett lives in a more rural area, and so taking advantage of two-day free shipping is a no-brainer – it saves both time, and gas. In JD’s case, buying off of Amazon can make the product cheaper, thanks in huge part decreased taxes, and that’s enough to infuse a little patience to accept a delay before he can actually touch the product. Meanwhile, Tom says that he spends “too much money” on Amazon, so Prime pays for itself.

Meanwhile, the biggest thing this minor research has taught me is that I wish Amazon took Canada (and I’m sure other countries) a little more seriously. On account of the fact that both Apple and Spotify offer music services up here in the great white north, I consider it bizarre that Amazon doesn’t. For me, Amazon’s streaming music would pay for Prime itself, considering that I subscribe to Spotify for more than Prime costs per year.

Maybe someday…