Starting next month, the less Prime subscribers pay for groceries on Amazon Fresh, the more they might have to stomach in service fees.
Amazon.com Inc. AMZN,
Delivery charges will be $3.95 for orders ranging between $100 and $150, Amazon said. But those charges get higher for smaller orders — $6.95 for orders between $50 and $100, and $9.95 for orders less than $50.
“We’re introducing a service fee on some Amazon Fresh delivery orders to help keep prices low in our online and physical grocery stores as we better cover grocery delivery costs and continue to enable offering a consistent, fast, and high-quality delivery experience,” an Amazon spokesperson said in an email.
See also: Amazon’s second wave of layoffs hits thousands of employees across three states
Amazon has been building out its Prime service, offering faster deliveries of as little as two hours to Prime customers without a charge. The company has run into profit issues in the past year, however, and has begun to look for ways to cut costs, including laying off 18,000 workers this year.
The company also discontinued its Amazon Smile program, which allowed customers to commit a small percentage of the money they spent to designated nonprofits. That move led DA Davidson analyst Tom Forte to question if Amazon was “losing its soul.”
For more: End of AmazonSmile charity donations ‘could not come at a worse time’ for nonprofits
Shares of Amazon rose 3.2% on Friday. The stock has declined 26.6% in the past 12 months, as the S&P 500 index SPX,
