INTERVIEW: Josh Lowitz - Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP)

Josh Lowitz is a partner and co-founder of Consumer Intelligence Research Partners. CIRP has been conducting research on recent Amazon shoppers since 2013 and was among the first to offer a meaningful estimate of Amazon Prime membership in the US. In addition to serving the investment community and tech industry with custom research and analysis, CIRP publishes weekly Substack reports on Amazon and Apple. I spoke with Josh for a few minutes and asked some tough questions for you.

Welcome to the WDADTW interview! Let’s jump in…talk to me about Prime in the US; it's stalling...right?  

Prime membership in the US seems to have reached its limit. After years of annual growth and a little final boost from the pandemic, our data suggests US Prime membership stopped growing in the past year. 

You say it has found its limit, but there are 330m people in US, no? That’s a fair few left…why can’t they convert?

We measure Prime membership by the number of US customers who use or have access to an Amazon Prime account, so 330 million is the right denominator. On the rare occasion that Amazon talks about Amazon Prime membership numbers, they talk about households, which is of course, how