Amazon has one of the most successful customer loyalty tools ever.
With its Prime program, the online retailer entices its customers to buy as much as possible from them instead of elsewhere.
Subscribers get their goods particularly quickly without additional shipping costs, and Amazon has bundled a package of other services such as streaming services around this core offer.
Prime is a powerful weapon in competition.
The more than 200 million subscribers order a lot from Amazon.
And most of them like the program so much that the company should have some room for price increases.
The increase in fees that has now been announced should still upset some of them very badly – Prime will be 30 percent more expensive in Germany.
That's steep even in the midst of generalized inflation.
And it is daring, especially at a time when Amazon's core business in online retail is weakening anyway.
Amazon is taking huge resentment among its best customers, even if in the end many of them will grudgingly accept the increase.