A weekly podcast with the latest e-commerce news and events. Episode 37 is a recap of Amazon Prime Day.
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Amazon held it’s second annual Prime Day on July 12th 2016. Scot and I break-down the good, the bad, and the ugly from this Amazon invented shopping holiday.
Amazon claimed it was it’s biggest day ever (but was a bit vague about what that meant). Amazon claimed US orders were up 50% this year over last year (up 60% internationally). Last year Amazon said they sold $400M on PrimeDay deals, so assuming a similar AOV this year, that’s $600M in sales.
Third party sales on Amazon were up 30%, reflecting the fact that it was still difficult for third parties to get in on the prime deals act.
Amazon did particularly well selling it’s own hardware, such as the Kindle and Echo.
There were some early technical problems for some users, prompting the #Primefail hashtag.
Amazon didn’t disclose numbers, but Prime Day was probably a major driver of new Prime subscriptions. Expect Amazon to promote all the other prime benefits hard over the next month (shipping deals, prime exclusives, music, video content, Prime Now, etc…) to help retain those new Prime members.
Several other retailers tried to piggy back on the Prime Day by offering their own “Black Friday in July” sales. Some evidence suggests that it was a higher volume than normal day for many other retailers.
Amazon is also eliminating many list (or MSRP) prices from it’s site. A number of articles suggest that Amazon may be doing this to enable it to raise it’s own pricing, but that’s almost certainly NOT what Amazon is doing. More likely they are eliminating list prices in categories where sellers have artificially inflated list price, and to help Amazon avoid deceptive pricing practice law suits.
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Episode 37 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Wednesday, July 13th, 2016.
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