Amazon says Prime Day biggest for sales
Company’s worldwide orders climbed more than 60% over last year
Amazon.com Inc says its second annual Prime Day promotion was the company’s biggest sales day ever, with worldwide orders climbing more than 60 per cent over last year.
Amazon created Prime Day to entice people to sign up for its $99-a-year membership (Dh363), which offers free two-day shipping as well as free video and music streaming. How many signed up this time isn’t known, but the company sold a record number of its own gadgets. Deals for tablets, Kindles and the voiceactivated Echo speaker were plastered all over the home page. The video-streaming Fire TV stick was the best-selling Amazon gadget and helped the company triple last year’s Prime Day sales of in-house devices.
The ultimate goal is to create a shopping experience and digital ecosystem that makes Amazon indispensable.
“Whether it’s video, e-readers, restaurant delivery, it all comes down to how much Amazon is part of your daily life,” said James Cakmak, an analyst at Monness Crespi Hardt & Co. “The more touch points Amazon can create with your daily routine the more it can monetise on membership.”
Though some shoppers encountered technical glitches early on, the problem was resolved and momentum built throughout the day. In the US alone, Amazon’s biggest market, Prime Day sales Prime subscribers spend about $1,200 (Dh4,404) annually on the website, compared with $500 for non-subscribers, according to Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, or CIRP, in Chicago. Amazon added 19 million US prime members since the last Prime Day — for a total of 63 million as of June 30, according to the research firm.
“If more Prime members shop more with Prime it pulls users away from everyone else,” said Poonam Goyal, an analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence. outstripped 2015’s results by more than 50 per cent.
“It’s a stellar number,” Cakmak said. “They’re well on their way to accelerating their mission of augmenting Prime usage.”
International demand
By late Tuesday Amazon started to see increased sales, with orders for third-party merchants increasing by 30 per cent compared with a year earlier, fuelled largely by international demand. The company relied on thousands of these third-party sales to drive this year’s spike, offering more deals and deeper inventory.
More than two million toys and one million pairs of shoes were purchased, Amazon said, and more than 90,000 TVs were sold. “They probably created more sticky customers,” with the sales, Goyal said. “Others have to think harder about how they’re going to compete with Amazon.