“he change in fee structure could be a sign that Fresh is stabilizing and poised for more aggressive expansion,” Anderson said. An Amazon spokeswoman, not surprisingly, said that wasn’t the case.

“An incremental, annual $199, paid up front, was unprecedented and a huge hurdle for mainstream households to commit to, even if Prime members skew to affluence.”Īnderson and other industry insiders have wondered whether Amazon intentionally set the previous fee super high to limit demand while the company worked out the economics. “This positions Fresh much more favorably,” said Keith Anderson, a vice president at Profitero, an e-commerce analytics startup that works with retailers and consumer brands. If you do the math ($14.99 x 12 months + regular Prime’s $99 annual fee), the new rate is only $20.12 cheaper annually than the previous $299 Prime Fresh fee.īut the fact that it’s paid out on a monthly basis and isn’t more expensive as a result should be key.

Along the way, it tested out demand with months-long free trials for regular Prime members and even a pay-per-delivery model in parts of California.īut this week, it erased all of the experiments and instituted a single, more reasonable pricing model for the Amazon Fresh service: A monthly fee of $14.99, only available to existing Prime members. In the three years since, Amazon has expanded Fresh to a few more markets: San Francisco, then the New York metro area and, more recently, Boston, Baltimore and London, too. When it finally did, opening up in Los Angeles in 2013, it came with a steep price: A $299 premium version of Amazon Prime called Prime Fresh, just for the right to buy fresh groceries for same-day or next-morning delivery. The Amazon grocery service, which includes same-day delivery of both perishable and non-perishable groceries, got its start in Seattle in 2007 but didn’t launch in any other regions for six years. Now, with a change to its pricing this week, one thing has become clearer: Amazon is indeed very serious about this business. For the better part of the last decade, Amazon Fresh has been an enigma.

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