The making of Amazon Prime, the internet's most devastating membership program

As an active subscriber, I find Prime very frustrating, the plethora of different benefits on offer sounds amazing. However, in practice Video doesn&#x27;t have the shows and movies I want to watch, Reading doesn&#x27;t have the books I want to read, Music doesn&#x27;t have the music I want to listen to and shopping still takes two days to arrive (to one of the biggest cities in the UK). It seems every time I want to watch a movie or a tv show or read a new book I go through a ritual of checking if it&#x27;s by a stroke of luck available on Prime and only to end up disappointed.<p>It looks to me like they went with something very similar to the 24h gym model - all these benefits which you don&#x27;t end up using.

They just stratified online shopping. Everything is becoming more and more stratified, from airline cabins to online content to education.<p>I&#x27;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.

In a way, The prime videos alone now is worth the price. Get access to wide range of movies and exclusive TV shows for 79£ (coming to 6.7£ per month - less than netflix). + Prime reads, magazines, prime music etc. One day and same day shipping is already a side benefit.

Prime really was a stroke of genius. The free shipping was just the lure. Once you’ve signed up, you’re now invested in using Amazon first for everything “because I’m paying for the membership”. Then they started adding video and the other benefits, and it became such a great value even if you don’t use most of the benefits.

Amazon Prime is such a great value in India, where netflix costs like 12$ a month, Prime comes for 12$ a year. And Netflix does not have that big of a catalogue in India, Prime having an almost similar sized catalogue.

I let my membership expire, I often find items cheaper at local stores that offer in store pickup.<p>So far whenever I’ve wanted something from amazon I’ve been able to qualify for the free super saver shipping.

Amazon Prime in Japan is such a great value. It&#x27;s about $40&#x2F;year (was $30 until recently) and almost everything I want has next day, if not 2 hour delivery. Prime now (2 hour delivery) started 2 years ago here. The combination of dense neighborhoods and non-car culture in Tokyo means that the delivery companies have enough distribution centers that last-mile delivery is often done by bicycle or foot. It must have been a good place to trial 2 hour delivery with this infrastructure in place. That being said, it&#x27;s via a different app which feels like a way to hide the premium price, rather than as a natural extension of the normal prime service. The video selection is also pretty good, but the UI and platform lag far behind Netflix. But, it and the other benefits are just a bonus. I&#x27;d be interested to know if for other people&#x2F;regions, video content is the main value with free shipping being the value adder.

Back in 2005 or so, I had a friend who was working at Amazon. When he told me he was ordering things like toothpaste, I could hardly believe it. His apartment was in easy walking distance of a drugstore, and I thought him ordering toothpaste from an online bookseller instead was insane. Little did I know he was living in the future.