Years from now, plenty of pundits will claim that Amazon Prime Now was a surefire bet from the start. Why wouldn’t customers want to pay a little extra to get their purchases within one or two hours? That’s how fast the retail world moves, though — and especially with Amazon — success is sometimes evident without being immediately apparent.
Listen close enough, and you can hear the sounds of retail pundits’ necks snapping with whiplash at the newest sales figures from Prime Now. In a note from Cowen & Co. Analyst John Blackledge obtained by MarketWatch, Blackledge explained that around 25 percent of all Prime subscribers made a Prime Now purchase during January. Given a ballpark figure of 40 million Prime subscribers, the Cowen analysis has Amazon’s barely year-old express delivery service pulling in 10 million customers per month as of the start of the new year.
