Prime Day’s war rooms are humming
Amazon’s mission: Sell, and sell itself, for 24 ( plus 6) hours
At Amazon headquarters SEATTLE here, two floors of conference rooms are outfitted as war rooms, the better to absorb the crushing blow of 85 million Prime shoppers feverishly tapping on the best deals on slow- cookers.
Prime Day ( or Prime Day plus six hours) is almost here.
What started as an experiment to shake up the shopping doldrums of July, with perhaps a sprinkle of inspiration from Alibaba’s wildly successful Singles’ Day, has turned into one of Amazon’s biggest sales days.
Last year, analysts estimate, Prime Day sales totaled $ 500 million to $ 600 million, or 1.5% of its third- quarter sales — compared with $ 3.34 billion for Black Friday.
Amazon ( AMZN), which does not release sales figures for the event, said sales surpassed the prior year’s Prime Day by more than 60% worldwide.
While this year’s Prime Day will almost certainly outperform last year’s, in the bigger picture Prime Day just isn’t as relevant as holiday sales in November and December, says Alasdair McLean- Foreman, founder of Teikametrics, a company that provides data analytics and optimization technology for sellers on Amazon and other e- commerce platforms.
But even if it doesn’t see a huge spike in sales, it’s “another excellent branding opportunity to own consumer mind share,” he says.
Bursting digital shopping carts help Amazon and the tens of thousands of companies that sell on its site to level out demand over the year, adding a nice bump of sales in July when things are typically flat, says Gene Alvarez, an analyst who follows the company for Gartner.
It also is a chance for Amazon to tout voice- ordering and to get more people engaged with its Echo voice- operated devices.
But mostly it’s a chance for Amazon to gather information, both in general and as a kind of stress test for the holidays.
“Prime Day is about experimenting and learning more about the customer experience and willingness to shop in new ways,” Alvarez says.
Amazon is preparing for this year’s Prime Day, which starts Monday at 9 p. m. Eastern and runs for 30 hours across 13 countries, to be a big one.
Amazonians ( Amazon’s internal name for its workers) who work on Prime are expected to block off June and much of July and take their summer vacations after the dust has cleared.
It’s all a long way from its beginnings as a doldrums of July sale, originally code- named Piñata.
The first Prime Day in 2015 got off to an inauspicious start. The team focused on the event had taken over a small conference room decorated with Piñata cutouts as its operations center.
Prime hit first in Japan, 16 hours ahead of Seattle.
As the sale began there, customers rushed online to start buying, and the Amazon. jp site promptly crashed.
Greg Greeley, Amazon’s vice president for Prime, literally fell off his chair as he lunged to deal with the problem.
The team got the site up and running again in two minutes, but the magnitude of what they’d launched was now clear.
“I got on the phone with AWS and I told them, ‘ When the sun comes up here, this is going to be huge,’ ” he told USA TODAY last week.
The first Prime Day in 2015 came about as the company was casting about for a celebration for its 20th anniversary, though it resembled Singles’ Day in China, an obscure event for bachelors that the Chinese digital giant Alibaba turned into a cultural event beginning in 2009. It sold $ 17.8 billion in goods last year.
Just as with Black Friday deals, the question for consumers is always whether they’re getting deals or duds.
Amazon’s first try at Prime Day was panned by some because too many deals seemed instead to be merchants clearing out unsold inventory, with Twitter calling out garage- sale- like goods such as shoe horns and granny panties.
The next year’s Prime Day felt a lot more like Black Friday, though an analysis by The Wirecutter found that while there were thousands of deals, few were what it called “great deals.”
This year, Amazon is pledging that any prices found in its deals will be the lowest for that item offered on its site in the last 365 days.