Small merchants doubled take on Amazon Prime Day this year
Online retail giant Amazon.com said small independent merchants operating on its website sold 40 million items during its recent Prime Day discount extravaganza, twice as many products as such merchants sold last year.
In a blog post on Amazon’s website, Amazon executive Peter Faricy said hundreds of thousands of small businesses and entrepreneurs sold products on the Seattle-based e-commerce giant’s self-proclaimed retail holiday, which took place July 11.
The announcement was vague on specifics but underscored how much third-party sellers have been using Amazon as a sales outlet and their increasing importance to Amazon’s bottom line.
Marketplace, as the online platform catering to thirdparty businesses is known, has become one of the pillars of the company, generating billions of dollars in income by charging merchants fees to sell products on Amazon’s site and, with increasing frequency, by storing these products and shipping them in the merchants’ stead.
Amazon launched Prime Day in 2015. It’s a day on which both Amazon and many of the retailers operating on its site offer discounts exclusively to members of the company’s $99-a-year Prime loyalty program.
For Amazon, it serves as a lasso to rope in new members, and as a way to test the robustness of its logistics in an otherwise dead period for retailers.
The company said the latest Prime Day was its biggest day ever, with global sales surpassing last year’s by 60 percent. Analysts estimate the blockbuster sale could have added more than $1 billion to Amazon’s top line.
The success of the self-proclaimed retail holiday was boosted by the popularity of the company’s gadgets.
The item that sold the most was the Echo Dot, a device that connects to speakers and harbors Alexa, Amazon’s voice-activated digital assistant. The Dot’s bigger cousin, a speaker called the Echo, was also a hot-selling item, and so were Fire tablets and Kindle e-book readers, the company said.
Prime Day also bodes well for another part of Amazon’s business: Alexa. Tech giants from Amazon to Apple are betting big on voice computing, which experts say is the future of the field. More Echos in customers’ hands mean an edge for Amazon’s emerging platform.