Today, we see Amazon as a “Giant” player in the e-Commerce market. It has once again caught the attention & heart of millions of Prime customers this year by featuring thousands of best products with amazing deals exclusively on the Prime Day held on 12th July, 2016.
The Amazon Prime Day this year featured more deals in a single day compared to the last year. It has recorded as the “biggest event ever” in the history of Amazon. This year, the site offered new deals every five minutes; while it featured new deals every ten minutes until last year. The customers were glued to the site to buy the products at the best prices ever.
Strategic move for the Big day
Amazon announced deals on almost every category it offers online. However, the deals fell into three main categories – Prime Day Spotlight Deals featuring the renowned products, Amazon Lightning Deals was a timed promotion that kept popping up throughout the sale, Prime Savings and Deals were available throughout the sale.
Amazon featured its’ own products on this day like Amazon Fire TV, Fire Tablet, Kindle Paperwhite and Alexa enabled devices at prices never seen before. It also had some solid deals on other brands under home cinema equipment category. The Amazon Prime Day sale this year showcased a better selection of deals and better combination of competitive pricing on selected products. Amazon’s strategy of making the Prime Day a successful event was a huge accomplishment.
What the numbers speak?
On the second annual Prime day, it announced 60% rise in the sales worldwide and 50% in the U.S. alone compared to the sales statistics on the first day of the sale. Amazon announced that the U.S. customers purchased nearly 90,000 TVs, 215,000 Instant Pot 7-in-1 Multi-Functional Pressure Cookers, 14,000 Lenovo laptops, 23,000 iRobot Roomba 614 cleaning robots, 24,000 Vivere double hammocks and 200,000 headphones amongst the other deals. While these figures talk about the U.S. customers alone; globally, Amazon has observed the sales of 2 million toys and a million pairs of shoes. All in all, Amazon in true sense had its Big Day.
One of the main reasons Prime Day was a huge hit is because the Prime customers were actually able to make purchases on the site without technical glitch. Prime Day is an event held each year where only Amazon Prime members can participate. At present, Amazon has an estimated 63 million Prime members in the U.S. alone; while last year it had 44 million subscribers. This figure shows that Amazon has recorded a 43% increase in the Prime customers’ subscriptions from 2015 to 2016. For obvious reasons, Amazon this year had to have tempting deals to get the customers bite the site on the Prime Day. On the inaugural Prime Day, Amazon sold more number of units than it did on the previous Black Friday which has until now recorded the largest sales each year.
Competitive Edge
Amazon announced that it gives small businesses an amazing opportunity to showcase their products in front of the new audience with Prime Day. This event has undoubtedly gained lot of media attention as it strives to have a competitive edge over its competitors like Wal-Mart in the e-commerce industry in the U.S. and the global market.
