Last week, Amazon quietly launched Prints, a new service for printing digital photos and creating custom photo books. With shares dropping 12 percent to close at $44.20 on Wednesday, it clocked in as the worst single-day decline for Shutterfly stock since February 2008. Amazon appears to be using Prints as something of a loss-leader to move customers to its online storage service – and course, Amazon has the server capacity to handle an influx of new customers, too, thanks to its cloud computing business, AWS. The larger 8×10 prints are $3.99 on Shutterfly, and $1.79 on Amazon Prints. On the other hand, Amazon says its photo books will start at $19.99, a good bit more than Shutterfly’s cheapest option ($15.99). My phone automatically sends photos to Amazon Drive as a backup, so I was able to instantly access my photo collection and select a couple of photos to print.
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Once uploaded, you can crop and resize the photos based on your own tastes, and you can choose whether the photos are printed on glossy or matte photo paper. It has well over 50 million US households as members, and they tend to spend far more at Amazon than non-members.
To promote the launch of Amazon Prints, the company is offering free shipping by default for an unspecified amount of time.
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Amazon confirmed to us that Prints launched last week, and is now only available online for its USA -based customers using either Amazon Drive or Prime Photos. Anyone who is considering paying this much is likely to simply pay $40 more and get the full benefits of Prime, which includes unlimited photo storage, plus unlimited streaming of music and videos and free two-day shipping on most Amazon orders. Worth pointing out, however, is that Amazon Prints is only available to folks who subscribe to other Amazon services, and a Prime subscription will set you back $99 per year.
