Amazon makes Prime more accessible

Consumers who want free two-day shipping of their Amazon.com orders but don’t want to make an upfront commitment have a new option.

Amazon is now making Prime membership available to U.S. customers on a month-by-month basis for $10.99 per month. Previously, Prime had only been available for $99 per year, which breaks down to $8.25 per month.

Prime provides free two-day delivery on millions of items. It also offers a variety of add-on services, such as streaming video. In another move to open its services to a wider range of customers and create new revenue opportunities, Amazon is also now offering video streaming as a standalone paid service for $8.99 per month. Industry observers are calling the new video streaming offering a direct challenge to Netflix and Hulu.

The e-tail giant has recently been making a number of competitive maneuvers designed to expand the reach of Prime. These include bundling Prime as a monthly service for Sprint mobile subscribers. Amazon has also been making its Prime Now same-day delivery option more accessible by adding it in 11 new markets (making a total of 27 markets), and will reportedly release a browser-based version of the Prime Now app.

Amazon does not publicly break down separate Prime figures, but it has been estimated there at least 46 million U.S. members and that Prime members spend up to twice as much as non-Prime-members in the course of a year.