Consumers who love Amazon's Super Saver Shipping now need to spend $10 more as the online retail store has decided to up the threshold from $25 to mail items for free. The company announced the adjustment to the decade old policy on Tuesday, a few days prior to the release of its third quarter sales report.
Aside from the minimum order bump, Amazon also noted of the expanded list of products across different categories that are eligible for its Free Super Saver Shipping.
The announcement was done through the company's blog. Amazon did not give any reason for the change but took the opportunity to promote its other products and services.
"Millions of Amazon customers have already made the choice of faster shipping by becoming Amazon Prime members. Prime includes unlimited Free Two-Day Shipping, with no minimum order size, on more than 15 million items, as well as unlimited streaming of over 41,000 movies and TV episodes through Prime Instant Video and access to over 350,000 books to borrow through the Kindle Owners' Lending Library. The service is so popular that more than a year ago we began shipping more items with Prime than with free shipping," the official notice said.
Paulo Santos, a contributor on the financial website Seeking Alpha, sees the move of Amazon as a desperate measure to recover from a bad performance. The analyst drew two conclusions:
"One is that Amazon.com is about to report earnings which will be worse than expected. And the expected number is already a loss, to begin with," stated Santos in his column.
"The second is that if free shipping was a great growth driver, increasing the threshold will be a great growth headwind. And with such a headwind impacting at the same time revenues are already slowing down materially and the Kindle Fire HDX is stumbling, it will amplify the effect," Santos added.
Santos anticipates ugly numbers on the Q3 report of Amazon that will be released on Thursday and expects Amazon's growth to decelerate more.
In 2012, Amazon reported losses of $39 million. In the second quarter of this year, it reported losses amounting to $7 million. Other analysts are saying the change might benefit the company as it pours investments in digital products and distribution centers.
