Jeff Bezos confirms Amazon now has more than 100M Prime members

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Amazon has remained tight-lipped regarding its Prime membership numbers until yesterday, when CEO Jeff Bezos confirmed that the company has surpassed 100 million paid Prime members globally in his letter to shareholders.

“In 2017, Amazon shipped more than five billion items with Prime worldwide, and more new members joined Prime than in any previous year — both worldwide and in the US,” wrote Bezos. The CEO says the company received more new Prime members on Prime Day 2017 (July 11, 2017) than any other day in Amazon’s history.

The closest estimate we’ve seen around Prime membership numbers was from a Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP) report last October which claimed Amazon had 90 million Prime members in the US — representing 63 percent of Amazon’s total US customer base.

According to Bezos, the 100 million number he shared reflected the company’s global count of Prime members. If CIRP’s estimate was correct, the overwhelming majority of Amazon Prime members are in the US. Earlier this year, Feedvisor conducted a survey among 1,576 US Amazon shoppers and found that 46 percent of the Prime members were making weekly purchases — with 6 percent making daily purchases.

The CEO also shared employment numbers — reporting the company now has more than 560,000 global employees — and provided stats around SMBs on the site. According to Bezos, more than 140,000 SMBs selling on Amazon surpassed $100,000 in sales in 2017, with customers ordering more than 40 million items from SMBs worldwide on Prime Day alone.

No date has been given for this year’s Prime Day, which regularly happens mid-July. Last year, Amazon extended its Prime Day from 24-hours to 30 hours, opening up sales the night before the official Prime Day began.