Perhaps you store your photos using Amazon’s Prime Photos service, or you use Amazon Drive for your disk backups. Wouldn’t it be convenient if you could just have Amazon print those photos out for you, in prints or in photo books? Today, Amazon announced its new Prints service, which is exactly what it sounds like.
This helps explain why Amazon offers photos storage as a Prime perk: sure, it’s meant to be one of the things you get in return for your $99 per year, but printing those photos on books, holiday cards, calendars, and regular old prints for framing will also turn those pixels into cash for Amazon.
The company also plans calendars and stationery “soon.” If those products come before the end of the year, they could take a big part of the holiday card and gift market from established companies like Snapfish and Shutterfly.
The starting Amazon Prints prices are $0.09 per print for photos, and $20 for photo books. Digital photograhy site PetaPixel notes that’s about half the price of the same services from Shutterfly, Amazon’s main competitor, and you may have already uploaded your photos to Amazon.
Bloomberg noted that the stock price of publicly-traded Shutterfly plummeted after the news broke. In an interesting coincidence, the new CEO of Shutterfly just joined the company at the end of May. His former employer? Amazon.
Amazon Prints [Official Site]
Amazon Swats at Shutterfly With Photo-Printing Service [Bloomberg Markets]
by Laura Northrup via Consumerist