Amazon might be the newest member of the Indian e-commerce marketplace, but in the United States, it's one of the oldest ones. For the first time, Amazon has revealed its paid Amazon Prime Subscription numbers to the public. In a letter to shareholders on Wednesday, Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon revealed that the company now has over 100 million paid Prime subscribers since the service launch 13 years ago. In the same letter, the company also revealed some numbers of Amazon India. Jeff Bezos stated that Amazon.in is the fastest growing marketplace in India, and the most visited site on both desktop and mobile, according to comScore and SimilarWeb. The Amazon.in mobile shopping app was also the most downloaded shopping app in India in 2017, according to App Annie.
Furthermore, Prime added more members in India in its first year than any previous geography in Amazon’s history. Prime selection in India now includes more than 40 million local products from third-party sellers, and Prime Video is investing in India original video content in a big way, including two recent premiers and over a dozen new shows in production. Amazon Prime Video in India has introduced several exclusive shows such as Inside Edge, Breathe etc.
Globally, in 2017 Amazon claimed that it shipped more than five billion items with Prime worldwide, and more new members joined Prime than in any previous year. In 2017, Amazon expanded Prime to Mexico, Singapore, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, and introduced Business Prime Shipping in the US and Germany. The company also stated that Prime Day 2017 was its biggest global shopping event ever and during the same day, more new members have joined Amazon Prime than any other day in Amazon's history.
Talking about Alexa, Amazon says that Alexa-enabled devices are among the best-selling items across all of Amazon. Alexa now has more than 30,000 skills from outside developers and users can control more than 4,000 smart home devices from 1,200 unique brands with Alexa. Besides, Amazon also sells tons of hardware devices, and it stated that 2017 was the best year for hardware sales at Amazon with customers purchasing tens of millions of Echo, Echo Dot and Amazon Fire TV Stick devices.
Amazon recently expanded its Amazon Music service to the Indian market, but it didn't reveal the numbers though. Also, Amazon did not reveal how many subscribers it has in India alone, but the number will be extremely good because Amazon is offering faster delivery service, Amazon Prime Video and Amazon Music service with a single Prime subscription at Rs 999 in India.
