Amazon Prime To Offer Real Christmas Trees This Holiday

Christmas Tree

To bring real live Christmas trees to its customers’ doors, Amazon plans to offer seven-foot plants on its site this year. The trees will reportedly be available in November, and some of them can be ordered with Prime shipping, The Verge reported.

Norfolk Island pines and Douglas firs will be available through the retailer, among other options. In particular, one North Carolina farm will provide a seven-foot-tall Fraser fir. The trees will reportedly be mailed to customers within 10 days after being cut down, and will be shipped in a large box. The retailer also plans to sell garlands, wreaths and other items for the holiday.

Amazon offered smaller versions of the plants last year, but online orders of Christmas trees made up only a small portion of overall sales of the plants. At that time, eCommerce sales only represented somewhere in the range of 1 to 2 percent of all the 27 million trees sold.

The news comes as Amazon Prime reached a milestone number of subscribers earlier this year: CEO Jeff Bezos said in April that the service had more than 100 million members. The announcement came in Amazon’s annual shareholder letter, Bloomberg reported.

Traditionally, Amazon does not release its Prime subscriber count. As a result, analysts have had to estimate its subscriber base through shopper surveys.

Beyond the subscriber count, Bezos said in the letter that Amazon has shipped more than five billion items to Prime customers, and also stated that 2017 saw the highest number of new Prime sign-ups. In addition, Amazon had its best year for hardware sales in 2017. Even so, Bezos said at the time that the eCommerce giant will continue to invest in growing its customer base, along with Amazon’s infrastructure and brand.