Just over a year ago, Amazon‘s Prime subscription service looked like it had plateaued.
Now, the membership is more popular than ever, according to new estimates.
Prime reached a record 180 million US shoppers in the first quarter, data from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners suggests. That’s the highest estimate CIRP has recorded since it started tracking the service in 2014. It’s also up 8% from the same period last year.
Early last year, when a pandemic online shopping boom fizzled out, CIRP estimates showed a drop in total Prime membership for the first time. The research firm theorized that the subscription service had reached its “theoretical limit.”
The latest estimates suggest that Amazon has blasted through this hypothetical ceiling.
“Growth in online shopping in the US is far from over, so we should not be surprised when the biggest player of them all gets its share of that market expansion,” CIRP wrote in a report released this week.
Now, 75% of Americans now use Amazon Prime, a record level of penetration, according to CIRP’s estimates.
The reacceleration in Prime membership growth shows Amazon’s faster delivery speed and an expanding set of perks are appealing to more US customers.
“An increase in Prime members today means that more US consumers are opting for Prime membership and concluding that their Amazon shopping habit justifies the investment in Prime membership,” CIRP said in its report published on Tuesday.
CIRP’s numbers represent the total number of individuals who use Amazon Prime in the US, not the number of households who pay for the membership. Prime costs $140 a year, or $15 a month, for US customers and comes with a number of benefits like video streaming and free shipping.
Amazon disclosed in 2021 that it had 200 million Prime members globally. Amazon’s subscription services revenue, mostly from Prime memberships, was more than $40 billion last year.
In his annual shareholder letter last week, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy mentioned the success of Prime multiple times, including its improving delivery speed.
“In 2023, Amazon delivered at the fastest speeds ever to Prime members, with more than 7 billion items arriving same or next day, including more than 4 billion in the U.S. and more than 2 billion in Europe,” Jassy wrote in the letter.
An Amazon spokesperson didn’t provide a statement for this story, instead pointing to this blog post about Prime’s benefits.
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