Brian Solis is the global innovation evangelist at Salesforce. In his book Mindshift, Brian tells the story of the origin of Prime Membership on Amazon. In this blog, we discuss the implications of this story for you.

Amazon engineer Charlie Ward was annoyed that he had to click again to take advantage of free shipping for orders of $25 or more. “I’m a one-click addict. I hate having to go through the order again.”

In 2004, he suggested the following idea to his team: “Wouldn’t it be great if customers just gave us a chunk of change at the beginning of the year, and we calculated zero for their shipping charges for the rest of the year.”

According to Charlie Ward, the response was, “Is Charlie crazy? What if the up-front fee didn’t cover the yearly total........

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