Amazon Prime Inventory Hits 33M Products In Q1

Amazon Prime’s product selection just keeps getting bigger. The $99-a-year service now offers free two-day shipping on a total of 33 million physical and digital products, including 13 percent of Amazon’s physical inventory, according to a report from R.W. Baird on Tuesday (April 14).

That represents a 47 percent increase over the past year in the total number of products available to Amazon Prime members. By contrast, Amazon’s overall selection surpassed 300 million different products in Q1, up 32 percent from a year ago. But 87 percent of Amazon’s inventory still isn’t available for Prime two-day shipping, “suggesting a meaningful opportunity for further Prime expansion,” the Baird report said.

A big part of that appears to be continued growth in third-party sellers who adopt Fulfillment By Amazon, which makes adding those third-party-seller products to Prime practical. “We see this trend generating a virtuous cycle of increasing Prime subscriptions, further category expansion, and greater unit velocity,” the Baird report said. “Currently, only 13 percent of all physical items are eligible for Prime shipping, including 25 percent of media products and 8 percent of non-media products.”

Items sold by third-party sellers now represent 80 percent of what’s sold through Amazon Prime, according to Baird’s estimates — with up to 90 percent of third-party sales in the Patio, Lawn and Garden category.

One of the non-physical items that Amazon has added to Prime is an ad-free streaming Web-radio service called Prime Stations, a companion to the million-song Prime Music collection, which Amazon launched last June. Prime Stations, which rolled out in March, gives Prime members access to hundreds of themed online “stations” through mobile or desktop apps. Music for any station can be played, skipped, paused or repeated, according to Amazon.

And on April 1, Amazon added its Dash Button to the service, which allows Prime members to get a Wi-Fi-connected button that a customer can push to instantly order products for two-day delivery. Product selection for that service is now just under 150 different items, according to Amazon’s website.