Will Half Of All Americans Be Amazon Prime Customers By 2020

It seems the Prime services has really worked out well for Amazon, and it is projected to continue to do so for the next 5 years.

According to a new prediction out of Macquarie Research, Amazon Prime will have signed up half of all U.S. households in the next five years.

Or at least almost half – the research note released this week indicated that 40 percent to 52 percent of U.S. households will hold Prime memberships by 2020. This would be a pretty big jump from the 20 percent to 25 percent of  U.S. households that are current Prime members.  That clocks in at around 40 million American who have free two day shipping and access to the Prime video service, among other benefits.

The Macquarie report says that about 10 million consumers tried Prime for the first time in the fourth quarter of 2014. “Many of those would be in trial accounts,” the report notes.

The top rated internet seller does not often release details on Prime memberships, though they did release in Q4 of 2014 that Prime memberships increased 53 percent last year, and 50 percent in the U.S.

However, Prime does cost Amazon some money. Licensing fees for content for its Amazon Prime Instant Video service increased 41.5 percent to $2.635 billion – up from $1.862 billion. Spending on fulfillment was also up, to $3.424 billion in 2014 from its 2013 levels of $2.918 billion. On the upside, part of the growth in fulfillment spending comes from Amazon managing fulfillment for more of the merchants that sell on Amazon.com.