Amazon is definitely looking to expand its grocery delivery business. After experimenting with different pricing models in a few different markets, the company has settled on one scheme for the whole country, and it’s a lower barrier to entry than the previous $299 up-front annual fee. Now customers who want grocery delivery will only pay $14.99 per month… on top of their Prime subscription.
Where things get tricky is that the change doesn’t make Prime Fresh a lot cheaper: it just spreads out the cost to monthly payments. That’s because, as Jason Del Ray over at Recode calculates, the original version of Prime Fresh included a full-year Prime subscription, meaning that the grocery portion cost $200 or $16.66 per month.
The new version is an add-on and you need a regular Prime subscription first. Still, that’s a less overwhelming price, and also means customers can try it out for less than a year at a time after a free trial to see whether they like it. If you don’t pay the $15, there’s a $10 delivery fee per order.
The markets where delivery is available have also expanded signficantly, as we predicted back in May: even I can get Amazon Fresh deliveries, and I live in a place where grocery delivery isn’t super popular.
by Laura Northrup via Consumerist
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