Amazon Launches Cheaper Prime Membership Variant To Compete With Flipkart VIP

Ahead of its festive season sale, ecommerce major Amazon has rolled out a new Prime annual membership plan priced at INR 399 for Android users. 

Called Prime Shopping Edition, the new offering is likely part of Amazon’s strategy to take on Flipkart’s recently unveiled VIP pass. 

Amazon’s new offering offers a no-frills shopping-only plan with free shipping, one-day deliveries and other related benefits. However, users will not be able to avail services such as Prime Video, Music, Reading, Gaming, among others, that come bundled with full-fledged Prime membership. 

The offering seems to be only available for users accessing the ecommerce platform via the app or mobile browsers on Android devices for now. Limiting the offering to just Android users could largely have been led by considerations around the fact that more than 85% of Indian smartphone users are Android customers. 

A detailed questionnaire sent to Amazon on the new plan remained unanswered till the time of publishing this story. The article will be updated on receiving a response from the company. 

“Once customers see and experience this shopping benefit, they would love to become a full member and enjoy all the other things. We don’t want them to think that it’s all or nothing. We want them to experience the shopping benefits and we believe that they will upgrade to full membership later,” Amazon India vice president Saurabh Srivastava told Moneycontrol.

The biggest attraction of Prime Shopping Edition appears to be a 24-hour early access pass for those availing the service. In essence, while Amazon’s flagship sale ‘Great Indian Festival’ starts on October 8, this pass will allow users to access it a day prior. 

Amazon’s rival Flipkart launched a similar offering, the VIP pass at INR 499 per year, just days ago. 

Meanwhile, there is no clarity on whether this offering will also be available for early access to other sales organised by the US-based ecommerce platform. 

The move follows Amazon preponing its festive sale this year to October 8 (from October 10 earlier) to coincide with Flipkart’s sale to grab a larger pie of the festive sales.

The move to launch a cheaper variant of the Prime membership could also be led by considerations around increasing the user base of Prime users in India. Amazon currently has 1.8 Cr-2 Cr Prime users against reported monthly active users (MAU) of 20 Cr in India. 

The membership also presents a very attractive opportunity for the ecommerce giant as Prime users, on an average, account for an average order value (AOV) of INR 1,800- INR 2,000 versus INR 1,000-INR 1,200 for non-Prime customers, as per Moneycontrol. 

Meanwhile, Amazon has ramped up efforts to capitalise on the demand for the festive sales. With fulfilment centres spread across 15 states and offering 43 Mn cubic feet of storage space, Amazon has also streamlined a network of close to 2,000 Amazon-operated and partner delivery stations across the country. 

Amazon India recently partnered India Post and Indian Railways to streamline deliveries, while it also claims to have created more than 1 Lakh seasonal jobs ahead of the sale. 

As per Redseer, the gross merchandise value (GMV) of the country’s ecommerce sector is projected to soar 18-20% to INR 90,000 Cr during the upcoming festive sale season. 

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