Amazon Prime
While Amazon Prime is hitting its peak in popularity now, expanding to countries around the world and with tens of millions of members just in the U.S., the program actually launched 12 years ago. In fact, Amazon Prime officially went live in February 2005 as an "all-you-can-eat express shipping" program.
Over the past two years, Amazon Prime membership has nearly doubled. As of April of 2017, there was a reported 80 million Prime members just in the U.S., which is a whopping 64 percent of American households.
While there's the option to pay a monthly subscription for Prime, which is $10.99 per month, most members choose to pay annually. Only 26 percent choose to pay on a month-to-month basis.
While there is an Amazon cash back credit card, you don't need to open one up to take advantage of a cash back deal on purchases. Its rewards program, Amazon Prime Reload, lets members load funds from a personal debit card onto their Amazon account balance. When they pay using these funds, they'll get 2 percent cash back.
Amazon Prime members get a number of perks including free two-day shipping, discounts and music and video streaming services, but another perk you probably didn't know about is unlimited photo storage, called Prime Photos.
According to research, Amazon Prime members tend to spend more per year, around $1,300, on the ecommerce site than non-members, who spend an average $700.
Amazon Prime is not only offered to Americans. People around the world have been using the service for a couple years now. It's available in the U.K., Spain, Japan, Italy, Germany, France, Canada and Austria, in some countries under the name "Amazon Premium."
According to the study, 79 percent of millennials said they had purchased something from Amazon.com within the past month.
With so many perks, it's pretty safe to say that people are loving Amazon Prime. According to a study, 25 percent of consumers rated Prime as their favorite loyalty program.