In its continuing efforts to bring more and more paying customers to its ecosystem, Amazon has just announced Amazon Student in the UK, which is a membership programme aimed specifically at higher education students studying in the UK.
Participants will get a six-month free trial of Amazon Prime delivery benefits, discounts and promotions and after the six months their accounts will automatically convert to a £39 per year Amazon Prime membership and all that that entails, including Prime Instant Video (unlimited instant streaming of over 15,000 titles) and Kindle Owners’ Lending Library (users can borrow one Kindle book per month from over 500,000 titles). The main criteria appears to be that you verify your account via your .ac.uk e-mail address and you can remain in the Amazon Student programme for four years.
With almost 2 million students registered on courses at undergraduate level in the UK, the potential take up of Amazon Prime is huge in this context, particularly when we see how prevalent buying online is with 18 year olds. Clearly, Amazon is continuing to make its marketplace ‘sticky’ for users by offering Amazon Prime with free one-day delivery on over 7 million items together with Kindle titles to borrow and instant video to stream—offering its newly released Fire smartphone to the mix with free Amazon Prime membership will surely drive more users to the marketplace.
Millions of reasons to sell on Amazon
Coupled with amazing customer service and unparalleled delivery options, Amazon knows that more and more people will purchase online from them if they already have an account (and credit card details entered)—it’s perhaps the biggest factor in online buying, with Amazon customers able to buy from the marketplace with 1-Click ordering. And with tens of millions of customers ready to buy with such ease and certainty, it’s no surprise businesses and individuals are flocking to the marketplace to reach those customers and sell their wares. With a great repricing solution in place, they can increase their sales significantly over their own webstores which typically have much less visitors.
It will be interesting to see if Amazon lets us know how many students join Amazon Student over the summer months and during the first term of university, but for online sellers, it’s certainly worth noting that there may be quite a few more 18 year olds heading off to uni with an Amazon account in tow—what could you be selling to them?
