Quote:
Originally Posted by Manabi
No need to worry about that, Amazon will keep the offer available because it leads to more signups. A significant portion of those will either decide to keep it deliberately, or forget and end up keeping it by accident. Combine that with all the deals on Prime Day and they'll pull in a lot of Prime subs.
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Perhaps that is their M.O. However, if they are "selling" a Prime membership for less than what it costs them (in extra shipping costs, reduced price of products, etc.) then they will
lose money with every signup that they get. On the other hand, if they lose money initially, but can gain it back over time from a membership, then it still can even be to their advantage, if they are looking at the big picture. They have to walk a fine line.
But I have a huge amount of confidence in Jeff Bezos (and his minions, too, I suppose) that He knows what he is doing. FWIW, Amazon is owned by stockholders. I don't know that this is as true as it once was, but I remember several years ago that the stockholders were complaining--maybe "protesting" would be a better word--about how they were not getting paid dividends (or as much as they thought that they should be) on their Amazon stock. Bezos's response was that he wanted to plow all of that money back into the business. One of his thoughts may have been that that would afford (no pun intended) him the opportunity to have promotions, like this one that we're talking about, in which Amazon would lose money initially, but over time would end up gaining much more.
I truly believe that Bezos is the greatest marketing and general business genius of this generation, at least in the U.S.; as Sam Walton was two or three generations ago.
My second paragraph, in the post above, was highly facetious, of course.
