Amazon said that there are “tens of millions of members” of its Prime service, which provides people with free two-day shipping and a list of other benefits.Ross D. Franklin/Associated Press Amazon said that there are “tens of millions of members” of its Prime service, which provides people with free two-day shipping and a list of other benefits.
SEATTLE — The world’s biggest online retailer has mastered the art of talking a lot about its holiday sales, while saying very little.
For years, Amazon has blasted out a press release, a day or so after Christmas, filled with a string of tantalizing-sounding factoids about the holidays at Amazon without actually providing a very meaningful picture of its business.
In 2010, Amazon said customers ordered more than 13.7 million items on the site’s peak sales day, Nov. 29 — “a record-breaking 158 items per second” — we were told in one typical release from the company. No word on how many of those “items” were paper clips and how many were plasma television sets.
The 2013 edition of Amazon’s holiday bragfest was surprising because it actually told many of the professionals who follow the company something they actually wanted to know, even if Amazon did it in the most cryptic way possible. In a quote in its press release, Jeffrey Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon, said: “Amazon Prime membership continues to grow, and we now have tens of millions of members worldwide.”
Amazon Prime is the company’s $79-a-year membership service, which provides people with free two-day shipping and a list of other benefits. By all estimates, it has been a big hit for the company. Still, Amazon has never said how many Prime members it has, leaving Wall Street analysts to make educated guesses about just how many people are paying the annual fee for the service, which is crucial to Amazon’s strategy for increasing retail sales, building a video service to compete with Netflix and other ambitions.
Of course, “tens of millions of members” leaves a lot to the imagination. Still, that choice of words clearly implies that Prime membership is north of 20 million accounts, higher than the 16 million to 18 million some analysts had estimated. Amazon also said it added more than a million new Prime customers during the third week of December.
Amazon’s new spirit of transparency did not, however, extend to its Kindle family of devices, the total sales of which are still shrouded in mystery. How many of the devices did Amazon sell this year? The company said only that “millions of customers unwrapped Kindle e-readers and Kindle Fire tablets this holiday season.”