SEATTLE – Amazon.com Inc. is amping up one of the most potent weapons in its competitive arsenal, adding unlimited online photo storage to its Prime subscription service.
Prime members, who pay $99 a year for the service, which includes two-day shipping on more than 20 million items, can now store every digital image they have in any size on Amazon Cloud Drive for no additional cost.
Prime Photos is the latest benefit of Prime, which also includes a Netflix-like video-streaming service and a lending library of more than 500,000 books for Amazon's Kindle e-reader.
The offerings are turning Prime, which debuted in 2005 as a two-day shipping service, into "the gateway" to a host of Amazon services that customers use daily, said Greg Greeley, Amazon Prime vice president.
Amazon never disclosed the number of Prime members, but RBC Capital Markets analyst Mark Mahaney has placed it at 40 million to 50 million.
Amazon continues to add benefits for a simple reason: Prime subscribers spend more money — Mahaney estimates as much as 2.3 times more — than non-Prime customers. They often want to maximize the $99 membership fee by using the service frequently. The more benefits Amazon can add to Prime, the more revenue Prime membership is likely to generate.
"Our customers have a voracious appetite," Greeley said. "People are thinking about Prime for their daily needs."
Adding unlimited photo storage, a service Amazon is launching Tuesday, gives customers yet another reason to spring for the membership fee and then rationalize that expense by increasing their shopping on the site. Greeley said he expects new subscribers to "try the photo storage and stay for the shipping."
