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Amazon to Increase Prime Membership Fee By Up to 43% for Customers in Europe

Meh I'm ok with this. We've never had a price increase in the UK so it's way past due.

Also you cannot in any way shape or form compare this to a Netflix type of price rise. Prime's so much more than that. Prime Video, Next day delivery, music, prime gaming, free kindle books, etc.

I just wish they'd sort out the main shop and get rid of the fake products being sold and shipped under prime!
 
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thankfully I was just charged my annual fee. I might have considered cancelling out of principal otherwise. There are only so many price hikes I can take.

The other day I went to IKEA and some nice but pretty basic drawer showed a price tag of 80 Euro. Went to get it, and it suddenly showed 100 Euro. Didn’t buy it out of principal, knowing how much it must have cost just a few days ago
 
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JW5566 said:
As a long term and loyal Amazon Prime member in the UK, I have mixed feelings about this. Working in retail myself I have seen astronomical rises in costs to ship orders out to people by courier, fuel is silly prices and even things like packaging (card, paper etc) have all increased in costs. So I do see some price rises as inevitable, and I will still save £££ a year on shipping. If I ordered a year's worth of stuff direct from non-Amazon sellers it would cost me a fortune.

On the other hand... I feel somewhat irritated Bezos is spending money on vanity projects like rockets (rides sold for leisure, not to advance the human race) and in the UK they are spending eye-watering money just to show something like 20 Premiership football matches. And as for Prime delivery, it's still a complete joke. How useful actually is "between 8am and 10pm" delivery? It was better back in the early days using DPD when they would text you an hour's delivery slot.

Also, having kept an eye on local jobs, Amazon are always recruiting here, and it's always £10 an hour. That hasn't gone up, so I wonder how much of this gets passed on to the lowly workers?

I can sum up Amazon as a service I can't do without (no local shops where I live) but a company I love to hate.
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Even Amazon's corporate jobs in the UK don't pay well. Project management roles in tech for 1/3 less than the going rate. I think they trade a lot on their name, to get it on your CV etc.
 
MacRumors said:
It's the first Prime price rise in the UK, Amazon's third-biggest market behind the United States. Amazon is also increasing the monthly cost of Prime in European markets, by £1 or 1 euro per month.
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I'm pretty sure it's the second price increase in the UK. IIRC, it was originally £45.
 
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JW5566 said:
I can sum up Amazon as a service I can't do without (no local shops where I live) but a company I love to hate.
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Same here. I'm in the Scottish Highlands and use Amazon a lot more than I'd ideally like to because Amazon Prime can still get me most stuff delivered "free" the next day (or day after at the outside) where quite a few of the other UK couriers used by other web sites seem to see the highlands as a free pass to add a £15 surcharge to any "standard" delivery fee, assuming they will actually deliver up here at all.
 
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It costed too little for what it was offering; as unuappy as I am to pay more, I knew this had to happen, eventually.

Now I'm waiting for the Xbox GamePass.
 
Jmausmuc said:
Is it just me or has Amazon become kind of unusable?

I find myself using them less and less.

If for example I want to buy an iPhone charger, I get hit with 100s of cheap Chinese knock offs that are hard to distinguish from good quality ones.

Same for boxers, I have ordered Calvin Kleins multiple times and I get the feeling some might be fake. A lot of people in the ratings are saying the same.

It’s really hard to find the right thing in their store these days.

I also find that shipping takes longer than it used to.
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chkay said:
Also you cannot in any way shape or form compare this to a Netflix type of price rise. Prime's so much more than that. Prime Video, Next day delivery, music, prime gaming, free kindle books, etc.
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Well, a 20% price hike is a 20% price hike... and it rankles because Amazon as a company has been making money hand over fist thanks to the pandemic.

It's just that Amazon is starting out from a position of being a better deal than Netflix - apart from the deliveries (your mileage may vary) they don't pull Netflix's trick of charging extra for 4k.

I don't put a lot of value in the free books & music - they're still very obviously just "tasters" for the paid services.

The other Amazon annoyance is that they've moved stuff that was included ad-free with Prime onto their new, free-with-ads service.
 
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mpkayeuk said:
UK inflation is 9.4%. The average across the EU is 9.6%.

The reason the prices are different is that the fundamental offerings are different and the market economics are different (e.g. strong English language bias in video content). So, what people in Spain are prepared to pay for Prime, vs. people in the UK, is not the same.

Source: https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/inflation-rate?continent=europe
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Also this isn’t entirely true. Look at Germany vs France, Italy, Spain, etc. German prices are on par with UK prices. I think it’s more about economics of the perception of wealth and how much Amazon thinks it can get away with.
 
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RightMACatU said:
This is no different from others like Netflix. They get big, popular, think that we are hooked, and feel that they own us before raising prices beyond reasonability. Like Netflix, I voted using the two feet rule. I turned-around, used my two feet, and walked away.
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I'm not fussed about this. Can't remember the last price increase and Amazon is still way better than anyone else to get goods same day or next day 7 days per week. Costs have gone up, but it's still good value to me.
 
KrisLord said:
How is prime so cheap in mainland Europe vs the UK?
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And Vs US? The Euro is 1 to 1 with the USD... Prime in US is $139 / yr. For that price I wish we didn't have to spend so much time trying to figure out if a product is a fake or not. It used to be, false advertising and knock-off products was a big deal and the Govt. would drop a hammer real hard on any company that did that. Now, ripping off consumers is open season. Fake Nike, fake Sandisk, fake toothpaste (who knows what's in there), fake medical devices like glucose meters, etc. No one does anything about it. Us peasants are fair game.
 
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theluggage said:
Well, a 20% price hike is a 20% price hike... and it rankles because Amazon as a company has been making money hand over fist thanks to the pandemic.
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Similar can be said about Apple. Apple has been making money hand over fist but that didn't stop them from recently raising the student plan prices of Apple Music in many countries.

It didn’t stop Apple from notably increasing the prices of various products recently in Japan.

We will likely see price increase on at least some of the upcoming iPhone 14 models.

For one reason or another price increases are going to occur, even with very wealthy and profitable companies. The good thing here is that consumers can have the final word. If they don't like the Amazon or Apple prices, they don't have to buy.
 
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I moved to a different country at the start of the pandemic and in this country, Amazon is still quite new and kinda sucks because they're not an established shop. Back in the UK, however, I ordered tons of stuff on Amazon, but moving here, I hardly use them - and I don't miss it, either, weirdly enough.
I think the convenience of "it'll be here tomorrow" made me buy an awful load of **** I really didn't need.

Jmausmuc said:
Is it just me or has Amazon become kind of unusable?

I find myself using them less and less.
[...]

It’s really hard to find the right thing in their store these days.
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This is something that I noticed toward the end in the UK as well. Trying to buy software (Windows and Office versions back then, lol) in particular. Sooo many "not a genuine product, reporting to customer service" comments.
Several times their drivers also dropped stuff off elsewhere and (surprise!) my stuff was gone and Amazon didn't reimburse me.
 
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RickDEGH said:
Also this isn’t entirely true. Look at Germany vs France, Italy, Spain, etc. German prices are on par with UK prices. I think it’s more about economics of the perception of wealth and how much Amazon thinks it can get away with.
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Yes, that's the market economics part... I gave just one example, but yours was also at the forefront of my mind.
 
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