Is Amazon underestimating how many Amazon Prime subscribers it will lose if it increases the subscription price as much as it says it may? Amazon CFO Tom Szkutak dropped a bit of a bomb on the company’s recent earnings call when he told Wall Street analysts that Amazon was considering raising the price of its two-day shipping service to somewhere between $99 and $119 annually. Prime subscriptions currently cost $79 a year. The company hasn’t raised the price since it launched Prime nine years ago, but fuel and transportation costs have risen since then, Szkutak said. Over that time, Amazon has also added a giant library of movies and TV show episodes that Prime subscribers can watch in a streaming format for free. Yet, a new survey conducted by Chicago-based research firm Consumer Intelligence Research Partners found that as many as 52 percent of current Amazon Prime subscribers said they would “probably” or “definitely” not renew their subscription if the price increased to $99.
