Amazon Prime hasn’t made a huge dent in Singapore, but it’s early days

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Amazon rolled out its Prime subscription service in Singapore just in time for the Christmas holiday, following the launch of the Prime Now fast delivery app in July. But these moves might not have been enough to tempt shoppers away from local ecommerce options.

While neither Amazon nor its competitors like to get too descriptive with their numbers, the latest data shows that Amazon is ranking below local rivals like Lazada in the shopping category of both the Android and iOS app stores.

However, app rankings do not tell the whole story. Amazon is currently not firing on all cylinders in Southeast Asia. It still has a chance to catch up, if it decides to add heat to the simmer.

Just a scratch

According to data gathered by App Annie, Amazon Prime’s rank rose sharply on December 7, just after the service launched, before slipping back down to double digits a couple of days later.

Meanwhile, Lazada – Amazon’s Alibaba-backed competitor – has enjoyed a consistently high ranking throughout the month, peaking at no. 1 in the shopping category between December 12 and 15. This is likely due to the 12.12 promotion, a sales event similar to Singles Day and Black Friday, in which several other websites participated but Amazon skipped.

The app also wasn’t able to surpass the rankings of other competitors like Qoo10, Shopee, and Redmart.

It’s a very different picture compared to July and August, when the Prime Now app enjoyed top-5 positions (although it was freely available to all users at the time).

All’s not lost for the US giant

Storming the castle