Photo printing is the latest addition to Amazon’s slate of services and that’s not great news for the likes of Shutterfly. Amazon Prints outputs snapshots for as little as 9 cents each and offers photo books starting at $20. What’s more, options like post cards and calendars will soon be added, too. The online retailer debuted Prime Photos in 2014, giving subscribers unlimited photo storage as part of their $99 annual fee. It also offers a standalone storage option for $60 a year. With Amazon Prints, the company has a way to make money off of the photos it’s storing for customers.
Shutterfly is a popular service for printing photos, making stationery and building photo books. Despite a a stock drop of 12 percent when Amazon announced Prints yesterday, we’ll have to wait and see if there are any long-term issues for the company. That drop was Shutterfly’s largest single-day decline in over eight years, but analysts told Bloomberg it was an “overreaction.”
Customers in the US are expected to spend $2 billion for online photo printing services this year according to market research firm IBISWorld, so it’s easy to see why Amazon would want a piece of that. Couple that potential revenue stream with the company’s existing photo storage services and Amazon should be able to grab a nice chunk of that tally.
Via: Bloomberg
Source: Amazon Prints